Talking Book is the fifteenth studio album by American singer, songwriter, and musician Stevie Wonder, released on October 27, 1972, by Tamla, a subsidiary of Motown Records.

This album and Music of My Mind, released earlier the same year, are generally considered to mark the start of Wonder's "classic period".

[5] Wonder played the majority of the instruments on the album himself, but he received some support from such guest musicians as Jeff Beck, Ray Parker Jr., David Sanborn, and Buzz Feiten.

Their unusual production technique of using multiple layers of instruments like the Clavinet, Fender Rhodes electric piano, and Arp and Moog synthesizers, rather than the more-typical string orchestra, helped to give Talking Book and these other three albums their distinctive sound.

[citation needed] The album's cover photo, taken by Robert Margouleff in Los Angeles,[2] features Wonder with his hair in cornrows, wearing jewelry, and dressed in African-style robes, in a "quasi-Biblical desert landscape".

[26] Reviewing the album for Rolling Stone at the time of its release, Vince Aletti called Talking Book "ambitious" and "richly-textured", writing that "even at its dreamiest, the music has a glowing vibrancy" and makes for an altogether "exceptional, exciting album, the work of a now quite matured genius".

[27] Writing a few years later in The Village Voice about Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life (1976), Robert Christgau said that "Talking Book is closer to a perfect album", as "a more complex and satisfying delight—a delight that combines the freewheeling energy of Dylan and the Stones with the softer accessibility of a Carole King—is provided by an artist with the ambition to ride his own considerable momentum and the talent to do more than just hang on while doing so.