To mark the end of the year, the Rail’s Art Books editors, Ben Gottlieb, Phillip Griffith, and Greg Lindquist, and Managing Director Sara Christoph each selected a notable book from the past year to share with our readers. This is not a list of the best books of the year. Instead, it is an informal survey meant to highlight the diversity of art book publishing now.

To mark the end of the year, the Rail’s Art Books editors, Ben Gottlieb, Maya Harakawa, and Greg Lindquist, each selected three notable books from the past year to share with our readers.

Before Francis Levy launches into the narrative proper of Seven Days in Rio, a hundred-odd-page bromide-heavy sexual fantasia, an author’s note appeals its case to the reader in a rare, self-conscious nod to the work’s guilelessly inflammatory inclinations; its tack is less conciliatory than defensive, with the vague hint of a threat.

The elevators in McKim, Mead & White’s imposing Clocktower Building go to the twelfth floor. The Clocktower Gallery is on the thirteenth. Throughout August, on the other side of an often-closed door along the gallery’s long white hallway, Will Corwin’s installation Auroch’s Library quietly grew; the artist spent the month steadily building upon a spare wooden frame.

The 2002 exhibition Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, at the Museum of Modern Art—the artist’s first major retrospective in the United States—was greeted by many familiar with Richter’s art with a common refrain: How could this have taken so long?

In Marion Cajori’s keenly attentive 2007 documentary Chuck Close, one of the artist’s most frequent subjects, Philip Glass, states, “There’s no such thing as a string quartet. A string quartet is what you happen to be listening to when a string quartet is playing.”