A Christmas Shelf: Bigness and Beauty

A Christmas Shelf

More of everything--particularly 'big, rich, fat, square Christmas books--seems to be the order of the season. Many are bought at the Frankfurt Book Fair from enterprising European publishers and imported wholesale. Several contain perfunctory yet prolix texts by scholars who take the money but regard the work as intellectual slumming; and the pictures are stuck in at random like plums in a Christmas pudding. Each year, though, a few more big books show encouraging signs of aim and editing. Still others are notable for size, subject matter, outrageous pricing and, occasionally, sheer beauty. Among the selections listed below, hard-driven Christmas-gift seekers will even find a handful of really good books--products of taste, intelligence, talent and the kind of professional care that almost amounts to love.

$39.95 to $75

ANDREW WYETH by Richard Meryman. 174 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $75.

The now bleak, now mellow autumnal world of America's most popular painter presented in lovingly printed reproductions. Better than a Wyeth show at a museum, partly because nobody's head gets in the way, partly because a brief, unassuming but fondly skillful text weaves together the man and his work.

THE FIRST FOLIO OF SHAKESPEARE, prepared by Charlton Hinman. 928 pages. Norton. $75.

As rare books go, the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays (1623) is not very rare: probably about 1,000 copies were printed, and well over 200 are still in existence. Though the original folio copies are the most authentic texts of Shakespeare's works, scores of them differ in innumerable minor ways--they were printed in odd lots and badly proofread. Lately, scholars, equipped with a special electronic device for detecting textual variations, have coordinated all the various versions and now offer what they assert is the clearest and most accurate composite text ever. Presented in facsimile form and substantially bound in leather, the enormous volume (10 in. by 14 3/8 in. by 3 1/4 in.) will no doubt prove useful to schools and scholars. People who read Shakespeare mainly for pleasure, however, will find the original 1623 type a bit hard to decipher. Moreover, the pages have a slightly dingy look.

GREAT DRAWINGS OF THE LOUVRE MUSEUM by Roseline Bacou and Maurice Serullaz. 666 pages. 3 vols. George Braziller. $60.

The pen-and-ink drawings, watercolors and wash and chalk sketches of great master painters are rarely seen. They fade easily on exposure to light and so are customarily kept in museum storerooms, viewable only upon special appointment. A great pity, as this collection amply illustrates. The 300 selections present a remarkable range of style and subject and a surprising spectrum of soft colors (the chalks and washes) that often show off the sharp eye and skeletal strength of the artist better than works done in larger compass.

GALAPAGOS: THE FLOW OF WILDNESS. 2 vols. Sierra Club. $55.

Yet another pair of books--the 19th and 20th--in the Sierra Club's devoted campaign in behalf of conservation. The textual message is sorely understated, but the incomparable color photography and reproduction make the point emphatically. The wildlife and sheer natural beauty of the Galapagos Islands (600 miles off the coast of Ecuador) inspired Herman Melville, who is quoted in the text, and Charles Darwin, who found in the ecology there the laws of natural selection that led to Origin of Species. It is to be hoped that Eliot Porter's fine pictures will not conjure up thoughts of a Galapagos Hilton.

REMBRANDT PAINTINGS by Horst Gerson. 527 pages. Reynal in association with William Morrow & Co. $39.95.

This year's Rembrandt book. The text by Art Scholar Horst Gerson is for the most part mercifully purged of art history jargon. Eighty big color reproductions (book size: 14 3/4 in. by 11 1/4 in.) have been carefully printed to reduce the yellow cast of ancient varnish that customarily obscures Rembrandt's backgrounds. The result, though it sometimes gives the impression that the paintings have just been overzealously cleaned and scraped, offers a rare chance to linger over details normally lost in murk. Weight: 10 1/2 pounds.

$25 to $35

DALI by Salvador Dali with Max Gerard. 232 pages. Abrams. $35.

Dali on Dali in (some) words and (many) pictures. Inevitably among those present: pre-pop Surrealist Dali, Prurient Dali, Renaissance Dali, and Dali, boy genius grown old. Also, on practically every page, Dali the pyrotechnician in paint, the most engaging, self-indulgent and talented decorator of his age. Appropriately wrapped, like candy, in gold tinfoil.

PORTRAIT GALLERY OF EARLY AUTOMOBILES by Clarence P. Hornung. 201 pages. Abrams. $35.

The pre-Nader stage of auto-erotica: a chronological arrangement of 100 carefully detailed 10 1/2-in. by 13 1/4-in. color renderings of such classic cream puffs as the 1853 Dudgeon Steam Wagon, the 1898 Riker Electric Tricycle and the 1903 Oldsmobile Curved Dash Runabout.

LANDMARKS OF MAPMAKING by R. V. Tooley and Charles Bricker. 276 pages. Elsevier (distributed by the New York Graphic Society). $32.50.

A stunning book with vast foldout copies of hand-decorated maps by 15th and 16th century master mapmakers. The text, a blend of history and cartographical lore, discusses the methods by which cartographers recorded the shape of the continents in the wake of discoveries by the great explorer-adventurers.

THE WORLD OF CURRIER & IVES by Roy King and Burke Davis. 140 pages. Random House. $30.

The uplifting images so prodigiously produced 100 years ago by Currier and Ives tend to obscure the fact that disaster gave these eloquent lithographers their first big success. Three days after the steamboat Lexington went down in Long Island Sound in 1840, Nathaniel Currier provided the New York Sun with a melodramatic print. The equally melodramatic caption read: "Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat 'Lexington' in Long Island Sound ... by which melancholy occurrence over 100 persons perished." But the better part of these 14-by 19-in. color reproductions from the private collection of Roy King reflect happier occurrences of America's transition from the pastoral to the industrial--maple sugaring, waiting on the levee. There are also numerous examples of those harbingers of air pollution, steamboats and locomotives.

CONQUERORS OF THE AIR, The Evolution of Aircraft 1903-1945, by Heiner Emde, illustrated by Carlo Demand. 201 pages. Viking. $30.

A massive mixture of the encyclopedic and the anecdotal, stuffed with slavishly precise scale drawings of planes and plans from the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk flights to the first jets of World War II, and accompanied by heroic adventure stories about famous flights and flyers. Mainly for boys of all ages who are canny enough to tell a SPAD S.XIII from a Polikarpov 1-16.

HOMES OF THE GREAT by Claude Ar-thaud. 364 pages. Arthaud (distributed by New York Graphic Society). $27.50.

Like most books of the "stately homes" genre, this model suffers from being too sumptuously static. Still, it boasts a refreshing angle: the houses were chosen not for their impersonal decor, but for the personal drama surrounding their notable owners. Among those included are the homes of Hogarth, Balzac and Tolstoy. Poet-Patriot Gabriele d'Annunzio's Tuscan villa sported the front end of a real World War I warship in the garden; George Sand's rambling chateau at Nohant had specially padded doors to protect her guests from the sound of Chopin practicing preludes in the drawing room. The best of these bizarre houses, though, belonged to a little-known gallant named Bussy-Rabutin (1618-94). Author of a book entitled An Amorous History of the Gauls, Bussy was banished from the Versailles of Louis XIV for being too rambunctious in his romances. Undaunted, he decorated his country chateau with portraits of earlier loves and court figures, and added snide and witty mural comment on them all.

THE SHELL: FIVE HUNDRED MILLION YEARS OF INSPIRED DESIGN by Hugh and Marguerite Stix and R. Tucker Abbott. 256 pages. Abrams. $25. Photographs by H. Landshof.

The authors feel constrained to impart a good deal of mollusk lore and cold facts under the impressive heading of malacology before getting down to the glories of this volume--82 color plates of some of the world's rarest shells. Polished, arranged, color coordinated and lighted to studio perfection, these examples attain a beauty they never possessed when their original owners were in residence. In vivo, mollusks are apt to be encrusted with organisms and covered with silty residues. Presumably, after "five hundred million years of inspired design," they get a little careless about surface appearances. Fortunately, man, the beholder, is still quite young enough to care. $15 to $20

THE WHALE..287 pages. Simon & Schuster. $20.

Assembled by a crew of international experts, this examination of whales and whaling in many ages and many waters should be blubbery and boring. Instead, it is one of the best organized and stylish big books of the year. The illustrations, including some deft Japanese watercolors, inevitably include scenes of indescribable carnage, but more often they illuminate more attractive aspects of the whale's world or the whaleman's work and art. The Whale covers everything from Ambergris to Zooplankton, but has no index--for which some editor should be harpooned.

EROTIC ART OF THE EAST by Philip Rawson. 380 pages. G. P. Putnam. $20.

For those who don't know anything about art but know what they like.

HEAVEN AND HELL IN WESTERN ART by Robert Hughes. 288 pages. Stein & Day. $17.50.

The worst horrors of the 20th century derive from politics or science or both. This was not always the case. For a millennium and a half the worst horrors were theological. The fear of hell and the hope of heaven gave shape to some of the greatest achievements of the pictorial art of Europe. On this eschatological basis, Australian-born Critic Robert Hughes has compiled a catalogue of terrors and delights, drawn mainly from Italian, French, Spanish and Dutch masterworks. Man, it is clear, has found it considerably harder to envisage felicity than its opposite, and so the infernal regions have been illustrated in a highly spirited fashion. The delineators of heaven, on the other hand, have found the place safe but dreary. The horrendous Hieronymus Bosch leads the field as a demonic painter; his surrealism still makes an indelible if no longer credible impression. The plates are plentiful, inclining in the heavenly to cool greens and blues, and in the infernal nightmares to somewhat hotter tones. Critic Hughes, who is also a poet, has written the text, which stands in its own right as a guided tour of the history and topography of the spiritual cosmos.

THE VICTORIAN SCENE: 1837-1901 by Nicolas Bentley. 296 pages. Weidenfeld & Nicolson (distributed by the New York Graphic Society). $17.50.

A rare organic blend of text and pictures that conveys the subject in a way neither could do separately. Bentley's sophisticated text uses chapter subjects--travel, leisure, work, fashion--to make cutting sociological commentaries as well as quaint observations. The age and time he covers is one that--as 20th century readers are increasingly coming to understand--heroically wrestled with pleasures and problems hauntingly like our own.

THE ROLLS-ROYCE MOTOR CAR by Anthony Bird and Ian Hallows. 320 pages. Crown. $ 15.

Concerning any other four-wheeled product it would have been gross flackery. But men who spell carburettor like that, and who do not quail at including stark blueprint drawings of engines, should not be denied. Lots of specifications, plus austere photographs of all these motor cars, so stately, so expensive, so regally indifferent to vulgar shifts in design.

MADAME DE POMPADOUR by Nancy Mitford. 304 pages. Harper & Row. $15.

An exceedingly U lady writer's svelte yet scholarly biography of Louis XV's hard-working and resourceful mistress, written in 1954 and now refurbished with attractive color and black-and-white pictures. Even though the volume is a rich-looking literary retread, it should help to break down the lingering notion that all fancy, illustrated books are hardly worth reading.

THE LITERARY LIFE by Robert Phelps and Peter Deane. 244 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $15.

In 1922, the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land prompted Ezra Pound to write, "It is after all a grrrreat littttttterary period." Kafka, Conrad, Lenin and Puccini all died in 1924. In 1931, Vachel Lindsay died from drinking a bottle of Lysol. In the same year Arnold Bennett attempted to demonstrate that the local water was perfectly safe in Paris. Irretrievably wrong, he died of typhoid fever. Inching year by painstaking year from 1900 to 1950, this collection of macabre literary trivia is practically encyclopedic. The illustrations are exotic, too. Among the best: E. M. Forster in a spotted skirt, Jack London in a grass skirt.

Under $15

THE FACE OF FOLK MUSIC, text by Robert Shelton and photographs by David Gahr. 372 pages. Citadel Press. $14.95.

Music should be heard and not seen. But for faithful folkniks who would like to see the faces of the music's dramatis personae and the places where it is played--from Mississippi John Hurt and Phil Ochs to Newport and the Fat Black Pussycat Cafe--this volume could become indispensable. The text is sensible, broad-ranging and clear. The pictures, often remarkably evocative, rarely descend to artiness.

IN THE WAKE OF THE SEA SERPENTS by Bernard Heuvelmans. 645 pages. Illustrated. Hill & Wang. $10.

Dr. Heuvelmans, a French zoologist and onetime jazz singer, cruised the libraries and archives of the world searching for evidence of sea serpents, and he has landed more than 500 reports of sightings, dating from 1693 to 1965. Discarding the obvious hoaxes and errors of the nearsighted and rum-soaked, Heuvelmans concludes that there are in deed huge unknown creatures sliding about in the sea. He quotes Sherlock Holmes' maxim--"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"--and proceeds to classify the ones that got away under such headings as Many-Humped, Many-Finned, Super-Otter and Super-Eel. For those who prefer their zoology less problematic, the publisher includes a condensed version of Heuvelmans' book on the giant squid.

THE ARTS OF THE ALCHEMISTS by C. A. Burland. 224 pages. Macmillan. $9.95.

A rambling scholarly text does not entirely obscure the provocative charm of this subject or the interest of pictures showing alchemists' tools and arcane symbols through the ages. Though alchemists did seek to turn base metal into gold, the greatest among them pursued this process only as a philosophical paradigm for the refinement of the human soul. Wealth might come, they believed, but ambition for wealth was a deterrent to philosophic progress--a sound doctrine no more widely adhered to in their day than in ours.

BORN IN THE ZOO by Helni Hediger and Juerg Klages. 141 pages. Viking. $8.95.

That old standby, baby animal pictures--but done better than ever. The gimmick is that all 56 here were born in captivity, and the preface is a homily on how homey a properly run zoo can be. Fine for anyone who would like to be able to recognize the next gaur calf he meets, enjoys the spectacle of a hippo baby nursing under water, or flips for cute puma kittens--which greatly resemble Barbra Streisand.

WATERLOO: DAY OF BATTLE by David Howarth. 239 pages. Atheneum. $7.95.

For anyone remotely interested in the world's most famous and most written-about battle, and how it felt to fight in it, this is undoubtedly the best buy of the year. A normal-sized volume with a splendid text based on the personal accounts of 18 little-known participants, it includes scores of pictures (some in color) as well as the requisite number of maps to help keep things clear.

MEDIEVAL CITIES by Howard Saalman. 128 pages. Braziller. $5.95.

More than 50 fascinating bird's-eye-view engravings of European cities (circa 1500 and 1600), with every street, church, wall, canal and house in its proper place. A brief text takes up problems of the walled city--best summed up as urban sprawl in reverse.

AN EXALTATION OF LARKS by James Upton. 118 pages. Grossman. $4.95.

With appropriately graphic, and occasionally very funny, antique engravings to illustrate the text, the author deftly deals with the genesis (and sometimes the subsequent exodus from the language) of more than 100 collective nouns (a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, a skulk of foxes, a labor of moles), most of which began in the 1400s in England as precise terms of venery. Happily, the collection has continued to grow during the intervening centuries: a shrivel of critics, an unction of undertakers (which, in larger groups, becomes an extreme unction of undertakers), and a swish of hairdressers. Etymology has seldom been pursued with more charm, literacy or wit.

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