A Rich Christmas Sampling

$40 and over

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Illustrated by Salvador Dali. 150 pages in folio. Maecenas Press-Random House. $375. Questioned about his stature as a painter, Salvador Dali once remarked, "I consider myself a very mediocre painter [but] I'm a better painter than my contemporaries." John Tenniel isn't a contemporary, but the original illustrator of Alice still seems best. Although Dali's Mock Turtle is stupendous, most of the twelve lavish color illustrations and one original color etching are more evocative of Dali than Alice.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Translated by Thomas G. Bergin, with illustrations by Leonard Baskin. 867 pages. 3 vols. Grossman. $75. A Dante scholar and professor of Romance languages at Yale offers a translation that tries to stay faithful to Dante's poetic rhythms but wisely avoids any attempt to match his terza rima rhyme scheme. As in many translations of classics, there are disquieting changes in well-known lines. Gary's familiar 1814 "All hope abandon, ye who enter here," for instance, becomes "Bid hope farewell, all ye who enter here." It may be more reflective, but it is less ominous and powerful. Leonard Baskin's murky, impressionistic black-and-white line drawings and washes fail to evoke Dante's sulphurous and radiant visions. They will have a hard time displacing the memory of Gustave Dore's illustrations.

Old Testament Miniatures. Introduction by Sydney C. Cockerel!; Preface by John Plummer. 209 paqes. Braziller. $50. Stunning facsimile reproductions of medieval miniatures that illustrate the Creation, as well as the subsequent doings of Adam, Eve, the serpent, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, Saul, David and Goliath, with as much lively detail as a supercomic strip and as much eloquent beauty as most Adorations of the Virgin. The book of the year at practically any price.

American Painting: From its Beginnings to the Armory Show by Jules David Prown; The Twentieth Century by Barbara Rose. 269 pages. 2 vols. Skira. $50. How and why American art developed from West and Copley through Homer and Ryder to Pollock, De Kooning and Warhol. With anecdotes about each painter, these companion volumes provide a wieldy and informative analysis of art technique in relation to the nation's history.

The Complete Work of Raphael. 649 pages. Reynal & Company. $45. The year's blockbuster (a 12-lb. book) shows and tells everything about the painter, architect and sonneteer who personifies the High Renaissance search for ideal beauty and harmony. Always overshadowed by the matchless genius and crotchety vitality of Michelangelo, Raphael in this volume exhibits unexpected depths of power and humanity.

Vincent Van Gogh by Marc Edo Tralbaut. 350 pages. Viking. $40. The tortured impressionist painter is so well known that to present him to the public again, one critic has observed, would be like presenting Christ to Christians. Nevertheless this is a splendid job. Calling upon more than 50 years of devoted research, the Belgian art scholar Marc Edo Tralbaut has put together the most satisfying study of Van Gogh's life and works yet.

$25 to $40

The Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry. Preface by Mil lard Meiss. 139 pages. Brazil ler. $35. Lovingly reproduced facsimile of the world's most famous medieval Book of Hours. The illustrations of the Psalms, the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary, as well as the seasonal work and play inside and outside the French chateaux of the Duke of Berry, are mainly by that trio of 15th century Netherlandish geniuses Jean, Pol and Herman de Limbourg. In their colors and contours, the Limbourg miniatures combine the jeweled precision of a goldsmith's work with a sense of men and landscape rarely matched in art.

Rembrandt: His Life, His Work, His Time by Bob Haak. 348 pages. Abrams. $35. For anyone who can stand another good book about the world's most overexploited painter, this tercentenary volume is massive (612 illustrations), meticulous and readable.

Dado & Surrealist Art by Williams S. Rubin. 525 pages. Abrams. $35. Marcel Du-champ logically extended Dada's absurdist principles when he stopped painting and devoted his life to chess. Surrealism, with its dreamlike images rising obliquely from the ruminations of psychoanalysis, also self-destructed in an orgy of cliches. As this lucidly written, generously illustrated book makes clear, though, the influence of both movements on Pop art, black humor and the commercial graphics of today is still strong. Comprehensive without being condescending, it is one of the best popular surveys on the subject.

The Eighteenth Century: Europe in the Age of Enlightenment. Edited by Alfred Cobban. 360 pages. McGraw-Hill. $30. An outstanding specimen of the coffee-table book: sumptuous illustrations informatively captioned for the browser, and authoritative essays on government, art, technology, etc., for the peruser. A book that can be either pleasurably read or just left around to give off emanations of cultivation and wellbeing.

The Gothic Cathedral by Wim Swoon. 328 pages. Doubleday. $30. If architecture is a language, no monuments anywhere evolved a more elaborate grammar or richer vocabulary than the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. The book provides a fine armchair pilgrimage, with photographs that convey both the massive drama of the great facades and the glory of the glass. Well calculated to make any cocktail table thoroughly ashamed of its tubular steel legs.

Europe of the Invasions by Jean Hubert Jean Porcher, W. F. Volbach. Vol. XII in The Arts of Mankind series, edited by Andre Malraux and Andre Parrot. 387 pages. Braziller. $30. One of the year's finest examples of the bookmaking art surveys the artistic output of the thorniest epoch in Western history: from the 3rd century, when barbarian invasions signaled the end of classical antiquity, to the 9th century when the new cultural unity of Christian Europe emerged. Superb color and black-and-white illustrations present everything from Ostrogothic jewelry to illuminated Irish manuscripts, as well as some magnificent frescoes recently discovered in Castelseprio, north of Milan. The learned authors make their way through this dark and fragmented period with intimidating and often opinionated aplomb. Fortunately, Editors Andre Malraux and Andre Parrot have relieved the strain with a long, rich supplement of maps, architectural plans, chronological chart, and glossary of persons and places.

The Avant-garde in Painting by Germain Bazin. 323 pages. Simon & Schuster. $29.95. Chief curator of the Louvre and author of the cross-culture survey The Loom of Art, Bazin examines the innovations of the masters and minor artists, from Giotto to Warhol, who were the revolutionaries of their day. If the book were priced at $30, the reproductions would be well worth the extra nickel.

$12.95 to $25

The Baseball Encyclopedia, 2,337 pages. Macmillan. $25. From the dawn of baseball up through the 1968 season, everything anyone could want for dominating the hot-stove league (Dick Radatz was history's best-hitting relief pitcher) or summoning up satisfying memories of heroic pinch hits and homers past.

Discoverers of Space: A Pictorial Narration by Erich Lessing. Preface by Archibald MacLeish. 172 pages. Herder & Herder. $22.50. Though the illustrated biographies of such pioneers as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Newton and Einstein run heavily to rich photographs of Renaissance studies decked out with astrolabes and telescopes, the book is remarkably imaginative, handsome and informative in conveying the evolution of man's conceptions of space.

Victorian Painters by Jeremy Macs. 257 pages. Putnam. $22.50. A Malayan-born English art dealer deals handsomely with a tribe of craftsmen-illustrators and artists who were not too proud to learn from the new art of photography, but who found too late that for mere illustration, the camera was a better box of tricks. The familiar horrors are here, from Landseer's Monarch of the Glen, looking so human that the laird who shot him should have given himself up for murder, to Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England, a soap opera about emigration.

American Manners & Morals by Mary Cable and the Editors of American Heritage. 399 pages. American Heritage. Boxed edition, $20. Accurately subtitled A Picture History of How We Behaved and Misbehaved, this sprightly book peeks at nudity, temperance, Victorian marriage (the death of an unmarried man went unwept), polygamy, camp meetings and ring-tailed roarers. Sample picture: "Stereopticon scene of wild abandon."

The Decorative Twenties by Martin Battersby. 213 pages. Walker. $20. The Twenties were not only roaring but highly decorative. Art Nouveau was replaced by art deco, followed by the geometrical, streamlined "new modernism." This comprehensive account deals with such things as posters, bookbinding, furniture, glass, jewelry and fashions.

Gardens of War, Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age by Robert Gardner and Karl G. Heider. Introduction by Margaret Mead. 184 pages. Random House. $15. Photographs taken by anthropologists are customarily of Box Brownie quality. This book, by two Harvard-trained anthropologists, offers dramatic exceptions, however. The delicately balanced primitive world they show belongs to the Dani tribe, an enclave of Stone Age warriors in central New Guinea. The pictures are beautiful and informative, especially in explaining war, which the tribe still practices as a ritual necessity, carefully limiting its deadliness.

Young Designs in Living by Barbara Plumb. 159 pages. Viking. $14.95. A fascinating social document, full of cheerful ideas about interior design. The book shows how today's "with it" people live in Europe and the U.S. They subdivide interior space into tricky levels. They love mirrors and blazing primary colors. Their art works are random--a bolt of Persian cloth, a chrome lamp, a billboard fragment, a lute. Does all this glitter mean anything more than an egotist's smile? Author Barbara Plumb, editor of the Home section of the New York Times Magazine, chats tersely about each dwelling, but wisely leaves conclusions to the reader.

Streets for People, A primer for Americans by Bernard Rudofsky. Illustrated. 351 pages. Doubleday. $14.95. A U.S. architect, engineer and enraged gadfly, Rudofsky thinks American city streets are now and always have been ugly, dirty and unfit for human habitation; and he offers fascinating pictures, mainly from Europe, to show how things could be improved. Rudofsky's pet hates: noise, cars, haste, uniformity, ugliness, greed and his fellow countrymen's habit of suggesting that criticism is unpatriotic. What he wants more of and thinks feasible are steps, arcades, automobile-free streets, covered sidewalks, plazas suitable for strolling.

Beeton's Book of Household Management --First Facsimile Edition, by Isabella Bee-ton. 1,112 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $12.95. An engrossing compendium of cookery, psychology, etiquette, management, legal, medical, moral and drainage information, which first appeared in England in 1861 and is still history's bestselling cookbook. "Men are now so well served out of doors--at their clubs, well-ordered taverns and dining-houses," the author points out, "that in order to compete ..." Any bride can finish the sentence. Mrs. Beeton, however, makes the role of bride only slightly less awesome than handling flight patterns at Kennedy airport.

The Grand Tour by Christopher Hibbert. 256 pages. Putnam. $12.95. "If a young man is wild and must run after women and bad company," Dr. Johnson once observed, "it is better he should do so abroad." But whether in search of pleasure, polish, or the splendors of Palladian architecture, young Englishmen, usually with tutors, infested Europe for three centuries. With well-chosen pictures and pungent quotations from travelers (including Diarist John Evelyn, Tobias Smollett and Edward Gibbon), this book gives a remarkably funny and extremely revealing country-by-coun-try account of Albion's impact upon the Continent--and incontinent.

Under $12.95

The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. 370 pages. Chelsea House. $12.50. Although the camping season ended some years ago when Susan Sontag explained it all, these selections from the comic-strip adventures of Buck and Wilma, "the blue-eyed, golden-haired, high-spirited young soldier-girl," are better late than never. Killer Kane, the Red Mongols, sexy space gear, baroque weaponry and quaint racial slurs--it's all here, from Buck's awakening after 500 years of suspended animation to his inconclusive battle with the Atomites.

The Indignant Eye by Ralph E. Shilces. 439 pages. Beacon. $12.50. From Hieronymus Bosch to Picasso, the author explores the lives and times of famous artists and the hot issues that caused them to turn their hands to political cartoon, savage caricature and posterish polemic. Hundreds of black-and-white illustrations do justice to the likes of Jacques Callot, Lucas Cranach, George Cruikshank, Daumier, Courbet, Rouault, Kaethe Kollwitz and George Grosz. Fascinating, especially for an age of rage, despair and pungent partisanship.

Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste by Gillo Dorfles. 313 pages. Universe. $10. A 16-inch-high statue of Jesus Christ with a clock in the belly is unquestionably kitsch--a German word meaning "rubbish." A six-inch plastic statue, of the same subject blessing an automobile dashboard is questionable kitsch, though the decision, like beauty, depends on the sophisticated eye of the beholder. Gillo Dorfles of the University of Milan has excavated the historical and contemporary worlds of religion, art, architecture, advertising and movies for kitsch artifacts.

Trafalgar by David Howarth. 254 pages. Atheneum. $8.95. What Howarth did last year for Waterloo he has now done for Britain's most famous and decisive sea battle. The achievement is not quite so notable; yet the book is a most clear and readable account of the engagement that cost Nelson's life and destroyed Napoleon's last hope of invading Britain.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen by R. E. Raspe and others. Illustrated by Ronald Searle. 138 pages. Pantheon. $7.95. Baron Munchausen became prince of prevaricators in 1785 and has reigned ever since. In this latest edition, a cherry tree blossoms again between the antlers of a stag, etc. Ronald Searle competes well with such celebrated previous illustrators as Gustave Dore and Rowlandson.

The Connoisseur's Book of the Cigar by Zino Davidoff. 92 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.95. What really troubles a woman about cigars is not their aroma but the look of contentment that drifts across a man's face when he lights one up. No meat loaf could ever do that, and she resents it. This informative breviary of cigarabilia--kinds, sizes, shapes, how to light up, etc.--by a Swiss cigar dealer is unlikely to lessen that resentment. Mainly for men with a sense of humidor.

The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. Edited by Alan Aldridge. 156 pages. Delacorte. $5.95. A broad selection--from A Hard Day's Night to When I'm Sixty-Four--with illustrations as up to date as record jackets. This cleverly conceived and skillfully packaged songbook visually conveys the romance, toughness, mockery and tenderness of the Beatles' style.

In Pursuit of the Mous, the Snaile, and the Clamm by Mary Durant. Illustrated by Victoria Chess. 247 pages. Meredith. $4.95. Subtitled "a roving dictionary of the animal kingdom," this lighthearted book traces the names of animals back to abstruse origins. (The lowly burrowing gopher, for example, derives from gaufre, the French word for honeycomb.) The illustrations are shaggy dog in style, but accompanying quotations from naturalists, explorers and novelists can be stern indeed. Thus Admiral Jaacob van Neck on the dodo bird, circa 1598: "They have thick heads only partially covered with feathers and in place of wings only a few black feathers. We called them DISGUSTING BIRDS, because the longer their flesh is cooked the more unpalatable it becomes." Sic transit dodo.

Caldron Cookery: An Authentic Guide for Coven Connoisseurs bv Marcello Truzzi, illustrated bv Victoria Chess. I 15 pages. Meredith. $3.95. Having exhausted everything from aardvark fried in yak butter to zabaglione a zingari, the compilers of cookbooks have turned to something really occult. Bats, eye of newt, serpents, felon's hands and less mentionable exotica seem to have formed the staple diet of the industrious witch. It should be said that this book serves no culinary purpose except perhaps to divert conversation among guests from the infamous concoctions some contemporary witch may happen to be serving in the name--not of the devil but Julia Child.

This is the Arlo Guthrie Book. 95 pages. Amsco Music. $2.95. A letter about love to his draft board, his eighth-grade report card, pictures of Arlo with his father (the late Woody Guthrie), pictures of Arlo singing, words and music to his songs--especially Alice's Restaurant--all provide delectations and deliriums for Arlo admirers.

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