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How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel is the culmination of research on gospel music undertaken by Horace Clarence Boyer, a gospel singer and pioneering scholar on the subject. Boyer skillfully combines the history of gospel music and its social context, tracking the development gospel from its early stages during its golden age (1945-55), into the 1960s, when the music form began to take its place in American popular music. Photographer Lloyd Yearwood’s rare photos of performances and backstage activity further enhance the written history.

Birth of the Cool may be the coolest book you will ever see. In this 2008 exhibition catalog of his first retrospective, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) distills black identity into powerful three-quarter and full-length portraits that teem with style and attitude. His sitters are unapologetic in their self-presentation and the result is a phenomenal elevation of African Americans who would have otherwise gone unnoticed in the decades immediately following the civil rights movement.