Design & Shopping: Want the look? Get the book

Which are the design icons of the 20th century? Four new guides let you know.

IF DESIGN is the new religion, there is no shortage of gospels to put devotees on the path to righteousness.

Four new guides to the designs of this century all feature the same classics, such as Mies van der Rohe's "Barcelona" chair (1929) and Michael Graves's kettle with a bird-shaped whistle (1983), but each book tackles the task in a radically different way. Chunkiest of the quartet is Design of the 20th Century by Charlotte and Peter Fiell (Taschen, pounds 15.99). With over 400 entries, ranging from Saul Bass, maestro of film credit design, to Aubrey Beardsley, there is no denying its comprehensiveness. But some entries are too sketchy - the page on Terence Conran tells us about his entrepreneurship but very little about his influence on design - while others state the obvious. A section on the avant-garde makes the unsurprising point that Marcel Breuer's tubular furniture was not as acceptable in the Twenties as it was in the Seventies. To track down a theme in this tome demands both effort and nimble fingers. The section on Arts and Crafts directs the reader to 20-odd entries for individual artists. A chronological approach might have worked better.

Bizarrely for a work on design, Michael Tambini's The Look of the Century (Dorling Kindersley, pounds 9.99) is cluttered in appearance and ill thought- out in concept. Profusely illustrated with designs good, bad and bizarre, it is weirdly arbitrary in coverage. Female fashion from 1900 to 2000 is hopelessly squeezed into four pages, while packaging over the same period is spread over 49.

The Design Museum Book of Twentieth Century Design by Catherine McDermott (Carlton, pounds 9.99), from which the illustrations are taken, adopts a more balanced, thematic approach. It is divided into 13 categories, ranging from fashion to transportation. The quirky choice of interiors includes a doorway at 2 Willow Road NW3 (Erno Goldfinger) and the archetypal Sixties boutique "Mr Freedom". And I was pleased to learn that the flowing typography still to be seen on shops throughout provincial France is a 1953 design called "Mistral", based on the handwriting of designer Roger Excoffon.

Most elegant of the four guides, 100 Designs/100 Years by Mel Byers (RotoVision. pounds 12.95) restricts itself to a single item representing each year. Such was the strength of Twenties and Thirties design that many remain household items: the Chanel No 5 bottle (1921), the Moka Express coffee pot (1930), the Zippo lighter (1932), Bausch & Lomb's aviator spectacles (1939). Philippe Starck's ubiquitous but deeply impractical "Juicy Salif" lemon press (1990) owes much to Raymond Loewy's streamlined pencil sharpener (1934), which never went into production but is "well known in design circles". Absurdly, the book devotes much of its space to listing events which took place in the year of the designs.

A quaint contribution to thinking in contemporary design is a sheaf of nine paperbacks, collectively entitled Symbol Soup (T&H, pounds 48). Each volume is the size of an LP sleeve and tackles a different aspect of "the images that have nourished Generation X (born 1963-1973) and Generation Next (born 1974-1984)". Half the pages in an introductory volume called "The Mix" consist of photos of an electric food mixer. Ha! So witty. The other half is an unfathomable text in large print: "as all grand narratives have lost their legitimising power, they no longer have the authority to prescribe, proscribe, or define anything."

But deep thinkers in the design field should not worry at the prospect of facing an excessive amount of text in the other eight volumes. One called "Body" is mostly photos of tattoos and piercings, while the double- page spreads in "Random Access" consist of questions related to single words in a vast typeface. "It must be confusing, being part of nothing?" is accompanied by "Nihilism." "You are an extended VCR, aren't you?" is partnered by "J G Ballard." Oddly, "How would you describe this book?" and "Twaddle" do not appear.