Deck the Shelves: For $275 and Under

$45 and Over

The Sistine Chapel. Text by Roberto Salvini, Ettore Camesasca and C.L Ragghianti. Vol. 1, 307 pages; Vol. 11, unpaged. Abrams. $275. When Michelangelo reluctantly began painting the ceiling in 1508, he still thought of himself primarily as a sculptor. He worked for years, mostly standing on the 62ft. high scaffolding rather than lying on his back, as hoary legend has it, and was interrupted by cramps, colds and periodic skirmishes with his testy patron, Pope Julius 11. When he finished in 1512, he was justly famous as "the divine Michelangelo." Ever since, writers have gossiped about, art historians studied, painters stolen from, and crowds journeyed to Rome to stare in wonder at the most massive and majestic blend of worldly splendor and Christian message that the Renaissance produced. Even though these two volumes cost almost exactly as much as youth fare flight to Rome, plus five days in a modest pensione, they provide more information--as well as more lasting, detailed and dramatic visions of the Sistine Chapel --than any tourist visit.

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Complete text reproduced micro-graphically. 4,1 16 pages. Oxford, 2 vols. With magnifying glass, $75. The complete O.E.D. took more than 70 years to prepare and runs to 13 volumes because it gives sample quotations, going back farther than William the Conqueror, showing how words have changed color through the ages. Before becoming a game, Badminton served variously as the name of an English country estate and a cooling drink. As late as 1848, "snoop" meant "to appropriate or consume dainties in a clandestine manner." The word doom was a synonym for statute until legal proceedings and human nature changed its meaning. Even though the microprinting can be read only with the accompanying magnifying glass, which makes for hard browsing, the whole O.E.D. in two volumes is the etymological buy of a decade.

Edward Hopper by Lloyd Goodrich. 306 pages. Abrams. $50. Lloyd Goodrich is an accepted authority on Edward Hopper, but his prose, a mass of uninformative fatuity, confines itself to such perceptions as "One of the outstanding characteristics of Hopper's art was his unwavering consistency." The reproductions are embarrassingly over glossy. Still this is the first book to present all Hopper's work in a large format, and that at least is a service to the memory of a spare, quiet and lucid painter of the American scene.

The Life and Complete Work of Francisco Goya by Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson. Reynal and William Morrow. $50. There was room for just one more book on Goya and this is it --the first complete edition of his works. From the pastoral sweetness in the early tapestry designs to devouring melancholy in the Black Paintings, Goya's creations record one of the broadest, most intricate and energetic imaginations in art history. Gassier and Wilson are indispensable guides, as they take up every known painting, fresco, drawing and print by Goya and link the whole with a biographical narrative. The plates, though small, are clear; the book completely justifies its price.

G. Braque by Francis Ponge and Pierre Descargues. 261 pages. Abrams. $45. The strong point of this lavish volume is the meticulous reproduction, mostly in subdued, subtle colors, of 134 of Braque's works, including several of the undulating late canvases that are less familiar to museumgoers. Alas, the pictures are accompanied by a mawkish, oddly defensive, thoroughly Gallic text, which runs on about "things as they are at this moment of what is called history." $30 to $40

Gaudi the Visionary by Robert Descharnes, photographs by Clovis Prevost. 247 pages. Viking. $40. A dazzling visual tour through the dreams, means and extremes of Antonio Gaudi, Catalonia's greatest architect (1852-1926). Main subject: the design and construction of the Church of the Holy Family in Barcelona, an unfinished masterwork of sculpture encrusted spires and portals that is surely the 20th century's most fantastic piece of architecture. The text is brilliant, compassionate, often wildly funny.

Twenty Silver Ghosts: The Incomparable Pre World War 1 Rolls Royce. Paintings by Melbourne Brindle; text by Phil May. 139 pages. McGraw-Hill. $39.50. For the price of this 181n. by 151n. volume, one could easily buy into the troubled Rolls Royce company, whose common stock has sold for less than $5 a share. At worst, the book's flossy pages would make far more attractive wallpaper than old stock certificates. The paintings of these aristocratic vehicles show something of the flattering veneration that successful portrait painters inject into their likenesses of the rich and titled. Such vintage relics of the Edwardian Age as the Maudslay-Bodied Shooting Brake and the Self-Driving Phaeton with Dickey Seat are shining talismans to hold against the vision of an internal combustion apocalypse.

Eyewitness to Space. Text by Hereward Lester Coolce. 227 pages. Abrams. $35. Throughout the Apollo program, NASA commissioned painters to record their impressions all over the world --from the drama of recoveries to the intricacies of equipment. Did the artists accomplish what charts and cameras could not? The answer is yes. One lingers in silence over these images, away from TV's technical jargon, the spacemen's cliches and the hard, restless eye of the lens. The intensity of response can be surprising.

The Romance of Ballooning: The Story of the Early Aeronauts. 197 pages. Viking. $35. When French peasants saw the first successful balloon over the trees in 1783, they thought the moon had fallen to announce Judgment Day. Ever since, manned ballooning has caught the inquisitive and festive imagination of millions.

The pleasure of this historical survey is that, from the pioneering Montgolfier brothers to Modern Expert Fred Bolder, who offers a primer for the newly smitten, it almost exclusively uses the excited words and pictures of the enthusiasts themselves. It should be noted, though, that the price of a balloon ranges from about $6,000 to about $12,000. Gas is extra.

American Indian Art by Norman Feder. 445 pages. Abrams. $35. A connoisseur's collection of Indian painting, weaving, carving and mask designs put together by the Denver Museum director responsible for the fine Indian art show now at Manhattan's Whitney Museum (TIME. Dec. 6). Amid a plethora of the overupholstered and overpriced, this book is a notable example of wampum well spent.

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers. 261 pages. Barre Press, Imprint Society. $35. Written in 1903, this is still the world's greatest sailing suspense tale. It makes the cruise of two Edwardian Englishmen in tidal waters around Germany as immediate and harrowing as last summer's cruise to Cuttyhunk. Any sailor who hasn't read the book should do so. Unhappily, this special edition is tarted up with Rorschach-like woodcut and wash color illustrations, thus sabotaging the realism of tidal charts, maps and seamanlike detail. Readers with unlimited budgets might consider tearing out the pictures and billing the Imprint Society for, say, $30.

The Lore of Flight. Edited by John W.R. Taylor. 430 pages. Tre Tryclcare and Time Life Books. $30. From Leonardo da Vinci's arm powered aircraft design to the last entry (Zurich airport) in the book's splendidly detailed Encyclopaedic Index, this is the literary package best calculated to keep air-minded readers desk or rug-bound for weeks. What sets the book apart is not only how much it has packed into reasonably small compass, but the precision and beauty of its illustrations, including galleries of great flying machines from then to now. $20 to $25

Masters of Naive Art by Oto Bihalji-Merin. 304 pages. McGraw-Hill. $25. This is not a case of over the river and through the trees to Grandma Moses we go. Instead, the author passionately but knowledgeably presides over a fabulous show and tell session spanning centuries and continents, the works of French customs officers and African chieftains. He demonstrates how dazzling, various and disarmingly sophisticated "naive" and "primitive" painting can be. A compendious and joyful package.

The Art of the Old West. Edited by Paul A. Rossi and David C. Hunt. 335 pages. Knopf. $25. Outstandingly handsome and informative frontier trip, even for those who cannot tell a Remington from a Winchester.

AND Specimen Days by Walt Whitman. 197 pages. Godine. $25. It was Randall Jarrell who said that Walt Whitman is usually written about "as if he were the hero of a DeMille movie about Walt Whitman." These memoirs should provide a freshening reminder that he was a gentle, reticent, large-minded man. Included are early recollections, the famous Civil War journals, and some serene "nature notes" from his last years. IIlustrated by 133 contemporary photographs, including many by Brady and Eakins, the book is one of the year's handsomest and most appropriately produced.

The Creation by Ernst Haas. 159 pages. Viking. $25. Formula for a nonbook: begin with the text of Genesis. Rummage through some photographer's lifetime supply of color transparencies for views of earth, air, fire and water, not to mention birds, beasts and fishes. Lay out in appropriate categories suggesting that the photographer has just been commissioned by some celestial art director to illustrate the King James Version. Bind and promote with reverence. Because Haas is an artist, the result is dazzling.

The World Atlas of Wine by Huqh Johnson. 272 pages. Simon & Schuster. $22.95. Last year's lavish token to Bacchus, The Great Book of Wine (World), cost $50. This year's is four times the book at half the price. Intelligently organized, precisely written and sensibly illustrated, the A this should prove valuable for the serious oenophile and the image-conscious expense account gourmand. One of Johnson's handy charts notes that red Burgundys from 1960, '65 and '68 are to be strenuously avoided, along with red Bordeaux for '63, '65 and '68. "Magnificent" is his term for '69 red Burgundys, though only a cad would drink them before '74.

Albrecht Diirer: Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands. Introduction by J.A. Goris and G. Marlier. 186 pages. New York Graphic Society. $22.50. When Pope Leo X excommunicated Albrecht Durer for his Lutheran sympathies in 1520, Germany's greatest artist packed himself off for a year in the Low Countries to draw, sell sheaves of his own work and frequent painters, princes and philosophers. Durer was the kind of man who listed the cost of everything from pig's bristles to fig cheese. But his account has long and justly been a prime source of fascinating detail about the state of painting, culture and commerce in Europe's busiest trading center. This edition, with an ample and readable introduction, plus reproductions of the silverpoint sketches, drawings and paintings Durer did along the way, is a rare and commendable blend of art and history.

A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter by Leslie Linder. 446 pages. Frederick Warne. $20. "Nature, though never consciously wicked, has always been ruthless," Beatrix Potter once wrote, and the remark got into this book--along with everything visual and textual that tells how the lady created the world's most charming children's books. This overpriced confection is a must for all those who regard Peter Rabbit's scrapes in Mr. McGregor's cabbage patch as pleasurably picaresque as Tom Jones' undoings on the road to London, or figure that Mr. Tod v. Tommy Brock outclasses Patroclus v. Hector any day. The facsimile reproductions of Miss Potter's original illustrated letters to the Moore children would make a fine book by themselves. $10 to $20

Larousse Encyclopedia of Music. Edited by Geoffrey Hindley. 576 pages. World. $19.95. A potpourri of minstrels and melody that manages to make the songs of old Provence seem as delectable as poulet a la provenANDale. So too with musical greats from Palestrina and Purcell to Wagner and Webern, in a handsome treatise that is informed and comfortably free of jargon. This is primarily history, not a quick alphabetical reference aid (readers wanting that should try the Oxford Companion to Music). The knowing may regret the cursory treatment of American music and wonder, say, why Stravinsky and Berlioz are given chapter headings, but not Mozart or Debussy.

The Hours of Et'ienne Chevalier, from the Musee Conde, Chantilly. Preface by Charles Sterling. 128 pages. Brazil ler. $17.50. Facsimile re-creation of a Book of Hours painted for an arriviste French nobleman about 1450. The artist, Jean Fouquet, was one of the 15th century's finest miniaturists, whose handling of celestial blues and golds as well as the soft pastels of spring landscape made him as much at home depicting heaven as earth. Fouquet's Descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Faithful includes squadrons of foiled devils in flight and cloaked elders in prayer. Beyond them the luminous Seine flows past the small green trees, dusty walls and spires of the He de la Cite, where Notre Dame Cathedral, its facade laced in gold, makes medieval Paris seem more than ever worth a Mass.

My Lite and Times by Henry Miller. 204 pages. Playboy Press. $15.50. Long before Hugh Hefner there was Henry Miller. Now at 79, the Dada of the sex revolution apparently keeps his own bunnies and when not chatting or nuzzling the cleavage of some visiting beauty, plays a steady defense game of Zen Ping Pong. This is a good example of coffee-table autobiography. It offers reproductions of Miller's corrected manuscript pages, and eight full-page color plates of the master's own sentimental paintings.

The White Nile by Alan Moorehead. 368 pages. Harper & Row. $15. Handsomely and intelligently illustrated in this reissue, this decade-old chronicle of the river, its sources and explorers stands up as fine travel history. The heroes, of course, are the eccentric British explorers of the last century: Burton, Speke, Baker, Livingstone. Through primitive lands, fierce populations and climates, and frequent pestilence, they hunted the Nile to its source in Lake Victoria--as Moorehead puts it, "a sunburst of Victorian courage."

The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus by Wilfrid Blunt. 256 pages. Viking. $14.95. The study of 18th century science can be an ennobling exercise. Outstanding men rose to survey and catalogue Nature's radiant data into logical systems. In Sweden, Carl Linne --Linnaeus to the world--collected, named and scientifically organized plants for the first time in history. Wilfrid Blunt's richly decorated biography admirably illustrates how Linnaeus' single mindedness and plodding devotion to stamens and pistils laid the foundation of modern botany.

Henry VIII and His Court by Neville Williams. 271 pages. Macmillan. $12.95. The fascination stems not from all those spouses but from all the fact and trivia about life--and death--in a 16th century royal court. We find Henry on a peacetime visit to France accompanied by a retinue of 4,000. His infant son was a breast-fed baby whose household at birth included a carver, a baker and a cellarman. Statesmen, churchmen, mistresses, artists--heads roll by until the reader feels as much in the domain of fiction as history. The many illustrations, including noble portraits by Holbein, only enhance the impression.

Van Gogh's "Diary." Edited by Jan Hulsker. 168 pages. Morrow. $12.50. A happy marriage of Van Gogh's letters and art, arranged chronologically so that the artist's sparse, honest words become an eloquent, often moving commentary on his highly charged work. Even as madness isolates him. Van Gogh remains totally in control of both his media. The reproductions are excellent.

Under$10

Guerrilla Television by Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corp. Illustrated. 108 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $7.95. In Shamberg's "information economy," people will live with their own home video cameras "feeding themselves back to themselves to develop a sense of video self and video grammar, and meanwhile building up a personal and public access video data bank." Good luck. Yet above this book's McLuhanoid jargon and bughouse semantics, one challenging notion shimmers: the hope that the power of commercial television can be decentralized.

Romanesque Art by George Zar-necki. 196 pages. Universe Books. $6.95. The author's first paragraph--typical of the text--is a veritable tympanum of qualification about the very existence of a "Romanesque period," which suggests to the reader that he is about to embark on a speculation about life on Venus rather than a discussion of one of Western civilization's great artistic realities. Happily, the black and white photographs warm up the 900 year-old stones they portray, and the 45 color plates are subtle and ungarish. Despite some faults (only one photo of Vezelay and no map of anything), it is a genuine art book bargain that brings alive a time when Europeans, recovering from the Dark Ages, began to build austere ehufohes and decorate them with frenzies of sculpture.

Notes in Hand by Claes Oldenburg. Unpaged. Dutton. $6.95. Proof that good things still come in small packages, this 61n. by 4 1/4 in. book presents 50 of Pop Sculptor Oldenburg's sketches reduced to one quarter of their original size, but with no diminution in wit or imagination. Who else can turn a pie into a typewriter before your eyes, or a pork chop into a brassiere?

Touch the Earth: A Self Portrait of Indian Existence. Compiled by T.C. McLuhan. 185 pages. Outerbridge & Dienstfrey. $6.95. Marshall McLuhan's daughter has opened a small inverted generation gap by matching sepia-tone photos of American Indians with their old fashioned linear laments about the Great Spirit's land going under the plow.

An Osborn Festival of Phobias. Text by Eve Wengler. Unpaged. Liveright. $6.95. Robert Osborn's cartoons seem perfunctory, but where else can one quickly brush up on the meaning of erythrophobia, pogonophobia, comapocopophobia, metopogrammoscopophobia or autophobophobia (fear of blushing, beards, haircuts, having one's character read by the lines in one's forehead, one's own fears)?

The Last Whole Earth Catalog. 447 pages. Portola Institute/Random House. $5. The last--though the first bestseller--in the series of cheerfully ingenuous catalogues of items (water pumps, canoes, books, domes) for anyone seeking self-sufficiency, even vicariously. The implicit message: escape from a consumer-oriented industrial society takes a lot of hard work--and a willingness to spend some money.

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