There’s always one person who’s a nightmare to buy gifts for. Particular in their likes and dislikes, these challenging individuals already seem to own everything they want and don’t appreciate a surplus. These art books will hopefully ease the pain of giving: like their recipients they evade easy categorization and provide aesthetic and intellectual pleasure in equal measure. They also have the added advantage of accommodating even the most overstretched yuletide budget.

On Being An Artist by Michael Craig-MartinBoth a renowned artist – who currently has a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery – as well as a crucial teacher and mentor to Damien Hirst and the Goldsmith’s generation of artists, Michael Craig-Martin’s powers of communication are second to none. And they are fully employed in this absorbing and important book. Broken up into over 200 pithy episodes, all written in MC-M’s characteristically wry and self-deprecating style, subjects range from “On being vulnerable” to “On what art is” and “On Me and Christine Keeler” (just one of a dramatis personae including Andy Warhol, John Cage, Philip Guston). Overall it provides a composite view of an exceptional, multifaceted figure with a wealth of experience to impart. Part deliciously gossipy autobiography, part instructional guide for would-be artists, part on-the-spot historical document of key cultural developments over the last half century; this is a must-have for anyone with the slightest interest in today’s art scene.

On Being An Artist by Michael Craig-Martin is published by Art/Books, £22.50

Art Rules! (And How to Break Them) by Mel GoodingA beautifully-designed box of highly-informed, erudite, and sometimes gently subversive, instructions on not only how to appreciate and understand art but also how to make it. But this is no low-brow primer. The slim volume is accompanied by a set of 42 illustrated cards, which are organised into categories such as Making Images; Arrays and Collections; Photo Art; Collage; Walks, Maps and Dreams; Surrealist Games and Found Objects Transformed. No conceptual stone is left unturned and every patch of art practice turf covered. Or you can just enjoy the pictures. One for the art-lover who thinks he/she knows it all.

Art Rules! (And How to Break Them) by Mel Gooding is published by Redstone Press, £19.95

Four thousand threads by Dick JewellDick Jewell is one of the art world’s best-guarded secrets. Since graduating from the RCA in 1978 he has worked at the forefront of film, video and photography – often crossing over with the fashion and music industries. His film on cult Eighties club Kinky Gerlinky (where he was resident snapper) is a classic. His latest book plunges into the now ubiquitous phenomena of online photo sharing. Create a rolling sequence of “threads” he traces a succession of predominantly amateur and un-Photoshopped events captured just as – or immediately before – they take place. Encompassing such recent phenomena as planking, photobombing (intentional and accidental) and bat-manning, to name but a few, this constantly-mutating procession of  funny, horrific, cute, sublime and grotesque images makes utterly compelling viewing, with the enjoyment lying as much in how and why Jewell has chosen to link these images as in the images themselves.

Four thousand threads by Dick Jewell, £40

Making Do and Getting By by Richard WentworthOne of our most important and influential sculptors, Richard Wentworth addresses the meaning and function of the most banal everyday items with the lightest touch. Since the late Seventies he has also been taking a constant stream of photographs depicting the objects and scenarios that have caught his roving, enquiring eye. Entitled Making Do and Getting By and described by Wentworth as “records of situations that attracted me”, these thousands of images form the conceptual underpinning of his work. Now, a carefully-chosen selection, dating from 2006 when Wentworth switched from film to a digital camera, has been captured in this book. (A second volume of his earlier analogue images is also in the pipeline.) Hot off the press – it was only published this week – this tome is an artwork in its own right, which provides a unique insight into the workings of one of our most enquiring and perpetually playful minds.

Making Do and Getting By by Richard Wentworth is published by Koenig Books, £28, Amazon

Viktor Wynd’s Cabinet of Wonders by Viktor WyndThe term “wunderkammer” or “cabinet of curiosities” gets a lot of airing these days, but it really does apply to the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities on Hackney’s Mare Street. Its rooms groan with an excess of the weird and wonderful – from shrunken heads and natural phenomena (hair balls from a cow’s stomach, anyone?) to the darker sides of surrealism, the Occult and contemporary art – whether the works of Hans Bellmer, artist Austin Osman Spare, deceased Dandy Sebastian Horsley or Tessa Farmer’s miniature fairies fashioned from dead flies and moths. This beautifully-photographed “subversive celebration of curiosities, art, mess, decay and self-indulgence” is not only devoted to Wynd’s own collections both private and public, but also provides a tantalizing tour of homes, private collections and museums all devoted to excessive accumulations of the odd. For those who like to venture into the wilder shores of acquisition.