Walking sticks seem stripped of all their connotations of lame legs in “Vertical Art: The Enduring Beauty of Antique Canes and Walking Sticks” (Hudson Hills Press, $350). This 400-page slipcased photo essay by the Italian photographer Umberto Barone shows 377 canes that all belong to one California collector who remains anonymous in the book; the captions are by Roberta Maneker.

The canes, mostly made in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, range from folk art wooden poles carved with animal faces to Fabergé snakewood shafts topped in spheres of semiprecious stones inlaid with diamonds. Mr. Barone’s photos only show the knobs, enlarged to saucer size and arranged in eerie tableaus amid smoke tendrils, water sprays, sand dunes and rose petals.

“Most books about canes out there have been meat-and-potatoes histories of canes through the ages,” said Ronald Varney, a fine-art agent who orchestrated the book’s publication for the collector. “This is meant to raise the profile of these fantastic, extraordinary objects, and not just be useful for the small niche of cane collectors.”

The owner will match proceeds from sales of this extravagant volume with a donation to a charity in San Francisco, the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation.

The website for the book is http://www.verticalartcanebook.com/