You’ll want to be sitting down for this news.

Oh, you already are? Perfect. That played right into our hands for this setup that you definitely saw coming about the latest glossy tome from Phaidon, entitled Chair: 500 Designs That Matter.

The book sheds light on just how long human kind has been thinking about how—and where—to rest our posteriors. Beginning with the earliest forms of seating devices and progressing to the rococo, to the minimalist and to whatever you call the design movement that led to a chair that looks like a giant hand cupping your ass... We can only assume the resulting 656 pages read somewhere between design porn and that scene in Knocked Up where a ‘shroomed-out Paul Rudd tries to come to terms with the number of different chairs in his hotel room.

Just don’t call it a coffee table book.