Well, hopefully no-one objects to this pick, though I could see a category fight over it...
But in the category of
Picture-book / Coffee Table book (photo or illustration), team
Bartleby and the Scriveners would like to select
In the Shadow of No Towers by
Art Spiegelman. This was a tough category for me, but in the end I felt that Spiegelman's book, which lacks the narrative coherence of a "graphic novel" is big and unweildy enough, and perhaps pictorially careful enough that it qualifies (at least in this household) as a coffee-table book. For anyone who own it: I challenge you to fit it into your bookshelf!
Spiegelman's masterwork is both a love letter to the history of the comic strip and a message of grief and incomprehension over the attacks of 9/11. At times strident and always trenchant, Spiegelman picks up the visual themes of comic strip history all the way back to the Yellow Kid and the Katzenjammer Kids. Overall, Spiegelman winds up creating a work not only about grief, alienation and powerlessness, but more critically a work about the redemptive power of the comic strip. If you don't own it--pick it up today--it really will change how you look at the comics medium.