If you're craving a beautiful new art book to grace your coffee table, or if you need to buy a gift for someone who loves the outdoors, you have reason to celebrate.

A new book coming out this week is filled with 181 exquisite color and black-and-white portraits and panoramas of our local geographical and cultural wonder: Mount Diablo.

Mount Diablo, The Life and Landscapes of a California Treasure features images by esteemed Bay Area landscape photographer Stephen Joseph, himself a local treasure. He has spent 25 years trekking up and down and around the mountain, capturing in photographs a landmark that has played a crucial role in local and California history.

Walnut Creek writer Linda Rimac Colberg provides the text that accompanies Joseph's images in this book published by Walnut Creek-based Mount Diablo Interpretive Association.

Joseph and Colberg will be at a talk and book signing Saturday from 1 to 3 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in downtown Walnut Creek. The two also will hold a slide show and book signing at the downtown Walnut Creek Library on April 13 from 6:30 to 7:45 p.m. 

The nonprofit Mount Diablo Interpretive Association is known for its comprehensive interpretive guide books and detailed maps of the mountain. The associaton's distinctive new 13-by-13-inch pictorial celebrates "the incomparable natural beauty and diversity of Mount Diablo," one of California’s most significant historical, cultural, and geological treasures, Colberg says. 

In this expansive photographic collection, Joseph has built what Colberg calls a "gallery of lush imagery from the perspective of both an artist and a naturalist."

The widely published and exhibited photographer is best known for his portraits and panoramas of Mount Diablo, but he also was the Muir Woods National Monument centennial photographer.

From the thousands of photographs he has taken of Mount Diablo, Joseph has reworked and remastered select creations to escort readers on a journey. The book represents the first effort to compile in one place an artistically ambitious visual tour of Mount Diablo. 

To accompany the photographs, Colberg provides information about the mountain, including its storied history as a geological wonder and cultural icon. In addition to profiling the mountain, she writes about Joseph and the mountain life of one family, the Greens of Berkeley, who had a home on Mount Diablo from 1938 to 1965 that was designed by famed Bay Area architect William Wurster.

For more information about the book and the events with Joseph and Colberg, visit the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce  website. 

Mount Diablo, The Extraordinary Life and Landscapes of a California Treasure is available at both Mount Diablo State Park visitor centers – the Summit and Mitchell Canyon – and at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Walnut Creek.