Many publishers find it difficult to include visual material in books. Among the exceptions are Tate Publishing, which recently published The Possibility of Life's Survival on the Planet, a short book to accompany an exhibition The Robinson Institute, at Tate Britain, which includes 71 images, nearly all colour, and Reaktion Books, who published Robinson in Space, with 217 colour images, in 1999. Here are 10 books that combine images and text, in the order in which I encountered them.
1. The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding by Beatrix Potter
On page 47 (of the 1987 edition): "He groped his way carefully for several yards; he was at the back of the skirting-board in the attic, where there is a little mark * in the picture." The accompanying drawing is of the interior of an empty room, its door open, with an asterisk on the skirting board. Like many others who have created works that include both pictures and text, Beatrix Potter was already an artist before she began to write.
2. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Emma Letley's introduction to the 1985 OUP paperback quotes Stevenson's stepson Lloyd Osbourne: "… busy with a box of paints, I happened to be tinting the map of an island I had drawn. Stevenson came in as I was finishing it, and with his affectionate interest in everything I was doing, leaned over my shoulder, and was soon elaborating the map and naming it … "Oh, for a story about it," I exclaimed, in a heaven of enchantment, and somehow conscious of his own enthusiasm in the idea." In a footnote, Letley adds: "Stevenson, however, claims it was his map, and not Lloyd's, that prompted the novel."
3. Towards an Architecture by Le Corbusier
Of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, the anonymous editorial of The Blind Man (assumed to have been written by Beatrice Wood) famously asserted in 1917 that "the only works of art America has given [us] are her plumbing and her bridges". Such appropriation of engineering was perhaps even more widespread among architects: in October 1920, "Three reminders to architects: first reminder: volume" by "Le Corbusier" – the newly-adopted pen name of the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret – was published in the first issue of L'Esprit nouveau, the journal founded by Jeanneret, Amédée Ozenfant and Paul Dermée. The essay includes nine remarkable photographs of grain elevators, "the magnificent FIRST-FRUITS of the new age". It was the first of 12 reprinted in 1923, slightly altered, in Vers une architecture: 'This book is implacable. It is unlike any other', proclaimed its publicity. Reyner Banham described it as "one of the most influential, widely read, and least understood of all the architectural writings of the 20th century". In his translator's note in the 2007 English-language edition, John Goodman suggests that "the book is as much prose poem as polemic, and that its vital analogies with modernist French literature – notably Mallarmé, greatly admired by Le Corbusier – should not be played down".
4. On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
This book, published in 1917, analysed the mathematical and physical aspects of biological processes to reveal, with the aid of indispensable drawings, how the forms of living things develop. In his 1961 abridgement, John Tyler Bonner wrote that Chapter IX "On the theory of transformations, or the comparison of related forms" is "the most celebrated chapter". The book has influenced generations of artists, architects and designers. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were among its admirers. Jackson Pollock had a copy in his studio. As a student at the Slade, Richard Hamilton designed the Institute of Contemporary Arts' contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain, the exhibition Growth and Form, a celebration of Thompson's work, opened by Le Corbusier.
5. Nadja by André Breton
Breton's novel begins "Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt'." The flânerie that follows is located with a series of exemplary photographs by the photographer Jacques-André Boiffard, the first of which is captioned "My point of departure will be the Hôtel des Grands Hommes" and is an image of the Hôtel des Grands Hommes, 17 place du Panthéon, in front of which can be seen, on a stone plinth, a large bronze statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that was melted down during the Occupation. Rousseau's unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker was published posthumously in 1782.
6. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Sukhdev Sandhu writes: "Linearity, Sterne believed, amounted to little more than selfishness." Sterne's graphic innovations begin with the black page, on page 73 of Volume I – see – followed on page 169 of Volume III by the marbled page ('motly emblem of my work') – see http://www.laurencesternetrust.org.uk/exhibition.php?id=100; in Volume VI, an invitation to the reader to paint Widow Wadman on an empty page provided, and the famously digressive narrative diagrams; in Volume IX, the flourish Corporal Trim makes with his stick, and the blank pages of Chapters 18 and 19, and frequent graphic use of asterisks throughout.
7. From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences by Ilya Prigogine
Each chapter of this book, published in 1980, begins with a page on which photographs by Fritz Goro – first one, then two and so on up to nine – demonstrate the evolution of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction, in which chemical scroll waves can appear spontaneously or be initiated by touching the surface of the reagent with a hot filament. Elsewhere in the book, there are images of the development of spiral patterns in slime moulds, and the cover image is of large-scale eddies in Jupiter's atmosphere.
8. The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald
In 1967, John Berger wrote: "It is scarcely any longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time. And this is because we are too aware of what is continually traversing the story line laterally." In September 1999, when I was convalescing from a brief unhappiness, a kind person gave me a copy of The Rings of Saturn. I read avidly until the narrative reached Lowestoft, on page 41, where "not a living soul was about in the long streets I went through, and the closer I came to the town centre the more what I saw disheartened me" at which point it was no longer possible to suppress the joy of recognition, and I laughed. The photograph on page 184 of Michael Hamburger's jiffy bags is accompanied by another favourite passage.
9. We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour
Latour's book includes a number of diagrams, among which Figure 1.1 Purification and translation, and Figure 4.3 Them and Us are perhaps the most suggestive. The book also includes an outstanding denunciation: "Heidegger […] and his epigones do not expect to find Being except along the Black Forest Holzwege […] 'We don't know anything empirical [say the epigones], but that doesn't matter, since your world is empty of Being. We are keeping the little flame of Being safe from everything, and you, who have all the rest, have nothing.' On the contrary: we have everything, since we have Being, and beings, and we have never lost track of the difference between Being and beings."
10. Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías
Berger's essay continues: "That is to say, instead of being aware of a point as an infinitely small part of a straight line, we are aware of it as an infinitely small part of an infinite number of lines, as the centre of a star of lines" (as a result of his enthusiasm for asterisks, Sterne was known as "The Vicar of Stars"). In 2001, the architect Iñaki Ábalos drew my attention to Javier Marías's All Souls and to the latter's having translated Tristram Shandy into Spanish. Last year, once again demob-happy, I read with increasing enthusiasm the three parts of Your Face Tomorrow, which I must admit do not include that many pictures.
• As well as his books, Patrick Keiller is best known as the writer and director of films including London, Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins. Tristram Shandy, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences, We Have Never Been Modern and Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Little Pig Robinson are exhibited in The Robinson Institute at Tate Britain, which runs until 14 October.
