Peter Galassi’s Henri Cartier-Bresson: the Modern Century (Thames & Hudson, £55) is a huge and beguiling foray into the life of an inveterate adventurer. This year also saw the first retrospective of André Kertész (Yale, £48) and a collection of the little-known work of Peter Sekaer (Signs of Life, Steidl, £43). This contemporary of Walker Evans – they often travelled together in their mission to document the Depression – produced photographs that are more spontaneous than Evans’s, and brim with little miracles engendered from dust and hunger.

Paris Between the Wars (Thames & Hudson, £28) is a visual survey of the years the French called les annees folles. Its selection of photographs, posters, illustrations, fashion and furniture vibrates at a beautiful pitch.

Across the pond, there were portraits of another city in New York in Postcards (Scheidegger & Spiess, £45), which traced the evolution of the city’s architecture and pastimes through the bombast of postcard artists. Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand (Yale, £25) offered a rare chance to see the three photographers who broke new ground for early practitioners, and in DC Comics (Taschen, £135) the superheroes swooped the famous skyline in formidably pulpy and shamelessly thrilling form.

A final mention to a small book titled Houdini (Yale, £25), which is a delightful discovery, stuffed with photographs and ephemera, including covers from Conjurers’ Monthly dating from 1905, and diary pages filled with his inky script.

As well as an enlightening peek into his peculiar talent, the authors consider the myth the man became, and its recent entry to the cultural lexicon as fodder to be mined by artists of today.