No Rob, forget the solar probe, put it into Earth orbit so that it will scatter back over us one day when we don't expect it.
As for Steidl... I found I had one of his productions on my shelf (Unedited photos of Jeanloup Sieff). The quality is in fact superb... not only for the printing, but the binding is done so that the pages lie almost perfectly flat when opened on a table... and yet there are no images spread across the gutter anyway!
Putting that alongside my latest aquisition from the second-hand book world (Lindbergh's Ten Women), there is no comparison...