Vanity Fair: The Portraits
By Graydon Carter and David Friend
384 pages; Abrams

What if you gave a dinner party and everybody came—iconic celebrities, era-defining artists, wits, wags, pundits, and world-class politicos? You'd have a taste of Vanity Fair: The Portraits (Abrams), spectacular images from the magazine's two incarnations, 1913 to 1936 and 1983 to the present, juxtaposing the taboo-smashing bravado of photographers Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton, to name just two, with the cool romanticism of Cecil Beaton and the luminous modernism of Edward Steichen.