By Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Topper Headon, and Joe Strummer. Atlantic Books, 384 pp, hardcover

Wait a second: a coffee-table book about the Clash? Wasn’t punk out to destroy everything that coffee tables stand for?

This stellar new archive is lavish, super-detailed, and, well, beautiful—all qualities that the gobby first wave of punk music claimed to hate. But then, as the book proves, there have been few movements in rock more image-conscious than punk, especially as the Clash lived it. Covering the years between the Clash’s birth in 1976 and the slow-motion collapse that began in 1983, the hundreds of glossy photos included here show a group whose visual style grew and changed with its music, from paint-splattered shirts to fedoras and ties, and on to a kind of jungle-militia chic. How the Clash looked had something basic to do with how it sounded. You couldn’t make a book like this one about, say, the Eagles, all regular jeans and the occasional beard. The Clash—particularly in images of its staggering live shows—is a band you can almost hear just by seeing it.

And the photos are only one part of the package. The book was put together largely by the surviving members themselves, who dug into their personal stores of memorabilia and came up with gig posters, set lists, tour schedules, ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, telegrams, artwork, magazine articles, postcards, and scraps torn from notebooks. All this surrounds the extensive interviews with all four members that form a year-by-year oral history of the band’s rise and fall.

Yes, the asking price would have kept Joe Strummer in cigs and lentils for a month back in the mid ’70s, when he was squatting in abandoned London flats. But it’s worth every cent. Between this totally satisfying book and Julien Temple’s fine documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, there’s little left to say on the subject. Except, of course, for what the songs continue to tell us with such brilliance.