The West of the Imagination (Oklahoma) was originally a companion to a very good PBS series 23 years ago, but the new second edition expands and improves on excellence.

In broad terms, the book is a deluxe history of art inspired by the American West, but William H. and William N. Goetzmann take “art” as a very inclusive concept. So their book includes Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, George Catlin and Georgia O’Keeffe, but it also includes John Wayne and John Ford, Sam Peckinpah and Harry Jackson, Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner.

The art is splendidly reproduced, the text is sharp and appropriate, and the overall package is impressive. The most surprising thing about the book is that it’s been issued by a university press, and not a conventional coffee-table publisher, which increases my respect for the good work done by the University of Oklahoma….

Prestel’s new edition of the great Japanese master Hokusai’s prints and drawings has more in common with The West of the Imagination than you might think — a landscape is a landscape, but Japanese artists saw their landscapes with a different eye. Hokusai lived to be 89, and was relentlessly self-critical; he didn’t believe that anything he did before the age of 70 was worthwhile.

Hokusai is to Japanese art as Ozu was to Japanese cinema — the starkest, the subtlest, the most Japanese. This collection includes examples of his work from all the phases of his life, including some eye-popping erotica.

Mike Browning’s Word of the Week…

twire: to peer, or look covertly.