For those of us who’ve always wondered about the culinary effectiveness of Anthony Perkins’ Tuna Salad or Rock Hudson’s Cannoli, Frank DeCaro’s The Dead Celebrity Cookbook (HCI) is here.

DeCaro reviewed movies for years on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and he now has a radio show on Sirius. He’s spent untold wasted years scouring flea markets for ancient cookbooks and magazines that offered celebrity recipes, and he’s gathered them together in one volume that is sure to be the campiest Christmas present you could ever hope to have.

Who wouldn’t want to try Ramon Novarro’s Guacamole, Raymond Burr’s Chicken Lolo, Alfred Hitchcock’s Quiche Lorraine, Gloria Swanson’s Potassium Broth or –– ye gods! –– Bea Arthur’s Vegetarian Breakfast?

They’re all dead, but these recipes await only your industrious efforts to bring them back alive.

Seriously: Who would ever eat anything called "potassium broth"? It sounds like something Marty Feldman accidentally hands Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein.

I can’t vouch for the recipes –– yet –– but I can vouch for the fact that the book is a hoot, and some of the recipes actually sound delicious. Not that they need to.

Something far more luxurious –– and, to be honest, much less amusing –– is Louis Vuitton: Architecture and Interiors (Rizzoli), a sumptuously produced guided tour of the retailer’s stores all over the world.

Each Louis Vuitton store is an architectural space unto itself, and there is much text on the whys and wherefores, none of which interest me as much as the company’s impeccably manufactured leather.

For those who don’t shop at Louis Vuitton, the Japanese stores are stark and forbidding, the Vegas store approaches the inviting, and the New York store offers the actual warmth of wood.

The most beautiful of all is the store in St. Tropez, as the warmth of the Riviera manages to be transported into the interior.

As is appropriate, the book is gorgeously bound in a silvery embossed leather. Once again, Rizzoli shows bookmaking is far from a lost art.

Mike Browning’s Word of the Week…

rugose: a plethora of wrinkles.