(click cover for a look inside)

Due January 15

There have been pictorial books about Mississippi, many very good ones, such as Faulkner's Mississippi, with photographs by William Eggleston and text by Willie Morris, or Willie Morris's other picture book, My Mississippi, with photographs by his son, David Rae Morris. There have been stunning books on the Mississippi Delta -- Burney Imes's Juke Joint, Ken Light's Delta Time, and Maudie Clay's Delta Land. There have been handsome, carefully-crafted books featuring Mississippi architecture, such as those by Mary Carol Miller and Patti Carr Black. There have been splendid black-and-white photography books that depict a Mississippi place and time -- Eudora Welty's WPA work, and the published photographs by Martin Dain, and by Jack Cofield, which captured William Faulkner's Mississippi milieu. There is the recent Mississippi composite album of places, people and businesses, Proud to Call Mississippi Home. There have been great pictorial books about other aspects or areas of Mississippi -- on the Natchez Trace, David King Gleason's beautiful work on Natchez, much of William Eggleston's work, or Ken Murphy's My South Coast Home: Photographs of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

But there has never been such an album of so many great, iconic Mississippi images -- pictures of places that we know, and think of as representing Mississippi in the ways of which we are proud -- as the breathtakingly beautiful, gorgeous, new book, Mississippi: Photographs by Ken Murphy (Ken Murphy South, $75). The book was due to arrive this fall, but printing problems caused a delay and it is only now reaching our shelves, but it is clearly -- as I write this on January 1 -- destined to be THE book of 2007.

It was not long after Ken Murphy published My South Coast Home that Katrina hit the Mississippi coast and destroyed his home, and the homes of so many friends and neighbors around him. This book is dedicated in part to "My fellow victims of Katrina and natural disasters everywhere." As you look through the beautiful images in his new book, it is hard not to think that the ruin of Katrina in some way had a hand in this book's beauty. Mississippi contains 165 plates, many from the Coast, and many that are very familiar to Oxford - Ole Miss folks.

Click on the book's cover above for a sampling of Ken Murphy's Mississippi -- the most splendid photography book on Mississippi to have been published.