Books: The Seasonal Shelf

ONE Christmas season, before long, some inventive publisher will simply order up a six-foot-long slab of a book and put legs on it. That will solve the problem of what to do with coffee-table volumes. They are just as massive as ever this year, and a little more expensive. Still, the shopper who cannot content himself with giving just a good novel, biography or history (heretical thought!) will find an imposing selection of Christmas books that are as satisfying to read as they are to look through. Among the best:

$20 to $35

AUGUSTE RODIN by Robert Descharnes and Jean-Francois Chabrun. 277 pages. Viking. $35.

With each passing year, Rodin emerges more clearly as the most profound, most expressively varied sculptor since Michelangelo, and here is a book that demonstrates why. In one superb photograph after another, the reader can trace the astonishing career of an artist who, though basically in the great classic tradition of Western sculpture, broke through formal bonds all his life. The text, an admirably incisive critique, enhances this tribute to Rodin on the 50th anniversary of his death.

THE AGE OF THE GRAND TOUR with introduction by Anthony Burgess and Francis Haskell. 138 pages. Crown. $30.

For size, sumptuosity, style and snob appeal, this resplendent volume wins any 1967 publisher’s award for conspicuous taste. Suggested prize: a gold-trimmed watch-fob—cigar-cutter holder in champagne-tanned platypus pouch. Avoiding today’s exhaustive and exhausting travel writing, this volume combines 18th century illustrations with prose from the past. The travelers’ tales date from the period when English was at its best and travel did not exclude wonder, awe, respect—and suspicion. “The first thing an Englishman does on going abroad is to find fault with what is French, because it is not English,” says William Hazlitt. On the other hand, in his splendidly evocative preface, the very contemporary prose stylist Anthony Burgess asserts: “In the most enlightened phases of Northern history, no man could be considered cultivated if he had not gone out to engage the art, philosophy and manners of the Latin countries.” Housebound in their in creasingly tight little island, the English, with a curtailed foreign-travel allowance, could afford perhaps the book, but hardly the travel.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF TOYS by Jac Remise and Jean Fondin. 252 pages. Ed/fa Lausanne. $27.50.

Proof again that toys are designed by adults for one another as often as for children. One can easily understand why in this elegant, color-illustrated survey of a key period in the toy industry’s history, 1860-1914, when the Industrial Revolution brought new techniques to toymaking. Machines could now roll metal into thin sheets, punch out forms, and fold them into the shape of toys that could be sold in greater numbers and at cheaper prices; inner works, such as clockwork miniatures, gave charm and humor to acrobat cyclists, gardeners with watering cans, mothers with prams, even mechanical accordionists who swayed as they played.

THE GREAT GARDENS OF BRITAIN by Peter Coats. 287 pages. Pufnam. $25.

The best of the English gardens serve to illustrate Thorstein Veblen’s theories of conspicuous consumption. Abbots-wood in Gloucestershire shows, against a foreground of geometric yews, urns and boxwood, a pasture well barbered by real sheep; the point is that the happy owners of Abbotswood could well afford a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower, but who can afford sheep? Great Gardens gives a wistful glimpse of past splendors whose grounds are as rich and idiosyncratic as their names: Hush Heath Manor, Luton Hoo (of which the grumpy Dr. Johnson grudgingly remarked: “This is one of the places I do not regret having come to see”), Sez-incote and Easton Neston. It is salutary to see that the English taste for roses is not allowed to disfigure these houses. The humble modern gardener-reader, picking the topsoil and expensive peat moss from his fingernails, may yet learn a lesson applicable to today’s poor plantings—that a little masonry or a few yards of brickwork do wonders for the foliage.

THE LAROUSSE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANIMAL LIFE with a foreword by Robert C. Murphy. 640 pages. McGraw-Hill. $25.

It is tempting to say that this superb animal encyclopedia is the perfect gift for the right type of boy, worth many times its weight (6 Ibs.) in plastic toys or colored non-books illustrated by lonely ladies. It is also an excellent home possession for men who have not forgotten that all their neighbors on this earth are not other men. Deservedly a French classic as La Vie des Animaux, it is now briskly Englished in a manner and style designed to inform without pedantically dulling the sense of wonder at nature’s grand theater. Larousse is a prodigal of information about the edible, economic, sexual and esthetic qualities of animals and fishes, but surely a line or two more might have been given to such exotica as the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea. Such cavils aside, the Larousse is a felicitous combination of scholarship, printing, layout and photographic reproduction. The beautiful medusa (phylum cnidaria, olindias phosphorica) is one of 100 gleaming color plates.

JERUSALEM: A HISTORY edited by Jaques Boudet. 294 pages. Putnam. $25.

This book ends before the recent Arab-Israeli war and its consequences for the city of Jerusalem. It does give a sound, comprehensive account of the nearly 5,000 preceding years that saw the “city seventeen times destroyed and eighteen times reborn.” More than in most such lavishly illustrated volumes, the pictures are usefully fused with the text.

GREAT INTERIORS edited by Ian Grant, preface by Cecil Beaton. 288 pages. Duf-fon. $22.50.

This volume is apparently designed to feed the fantasies of split-level people who yearn to wake up one morning in a Palladian villa, a Roman palazzo or a great Georgian house in County Wicklow. The sumptuous interiors on display evoke the spacious days when every European princeling was building his own little Versailles and architects like Nash, Vanbrugh, Inigo Jones and Wyatt were adapting Italian magnificence for English country gentlemen. The modern eye can only goggle in awe at heroic staircases, ceilings bulging with putti, acres of marble floors reflecting miles of gilded plaster. Magnificence had become largely a semi-public affair, as in Queen Victoria’s railway carriage (sapphire satin and tasseled draperies with a white quilted ceiling) and not merely ostentatious, as in the dining room at London’s Ritz Hotel (“the most beautiful Edwardian restaurant in existence”).

WILDERNESS KINGDOM: THE JOURNALS AND PAINTINGS OF NICOLAS POINT, S.J. translated and introduced by Joseph P. Donnelly, S.J. 274 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $21.95.

Published for the first time are the journal and 285 paintings, sketches and maps in which Father Point made impressively authentic records of the customs, family life, garb, dances and ceremonies of Indian tribes with whom he lived from 1841 to 1847.

THE SEARCH FOR SPEED UNDER SAIL, 1700-1855 by Howard I. Chapelle. 453 pages. Norton. $20.

This is clearly a technical book, but amateur sailors—the most passionate kind—should be fascinated by the meticulous design plans of some of the finest American sailing ships ever to draw a breeze. Only a bold sense of beauty could have given birth to these craft, but the ingenuity that made them functional is the author’s real subject.

THE WORLD OF ANCIENT ROME edited byGiulioGiannelli. 300 pages. Putnam. $20.

The title is somewhat misleading. This book, the work of more than a dozen experts, tells and shows how Romans of all classes actually lived. Starting with the town plan of Augustus, it proceeds to the kitchen, the bath, the school, the soldier’s bivouac, and on to the theater, the doctor’s office, what people wore, and the brutal pleasures of the amphitheater. A substantial, workmanlike job of real interest.

$15 to $20

THE IMPERIAL COLLECTION OF AUDUBON ANIMALS edited with new text by Victor E. Cuhalane. 307 pages. Hammond. $19.95.

Audubon was interested in beasts as well as birds. He and his two sons contributed the illustrations of this volume, now reissued after 119 years; they are lively, formal, detailed and at the same time natural. Unlike his great

Birds of America, which he claimed (somewhat extravagantly) to have done entirely from life, the animals were nature morte. Since his subjects included the grizzly bear and the grey, or timber, wolf, this is easy to understand. Like all other naturalists, Audubon loved the things he killed. His views are reflected in this remark: “If a wolf passes your tent in the wilderness, he is likely to be less unpleasant than your next-door neighbor back home.”

CONSTRUCTIVISM: ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION by George Rickey. 305 pages. Braziller. $1 5.

Constructivism has nothing—well, almost nothing—to do with the power of positive thinking. It is an art movement concerned with the pure joy derived from geometric structure and line. Thus, Piet Mondrian’s fleshless, vertical-horizontal paintings qualify, but, according to the author, the mobiles of Kineticist Alexander Calder do not (“too lyrical and subjective”). The style can be seen in the U.S. in the symmetrical paintings of Josef Albers and Frank Stella, and in some of the space sculptures of men like Richard Lippold. George Rickey writes with clarity and spirit, and his opinions and knowledge reflect the experience to be expected in a leading creator of moving sculpture.

THE CONNOISSEUR’S COOKBOOK by Robert Carrier. 505 pages. Random House. $15.

Just the thing for people who like to read cookbooks in bed. The text is so luxuriously arranged and the color photographs are so tempting that some remarkable culinary dreams should result. Tested in the kitchen, the recipes (pheasant mousse, sole and crayfish tarts) should prove just as irresistible, with a little luck. Note: quaint but regrettably euphelingual is the author’s description of a celebrated American dish as Oeufs Benedictine.

ALEXIS LICHINE’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WINES AND SPIRITS. 713 pages. Knopf. $15.

“For the fortunate one owning a large cellar, it would be wise to have the bottles recorked every 25 to 30 years. This is the maximum expected lifespan of a good cork.” Care of the cork is only one of the many fine points explored in this exhaustive and literate treatise on the choice, care and consumption of the principal wines of France, Germany, Italy, the U.S., and the rest of the world. For example, one should serve champagne in tulip-shaped rather than the more familiar wide glasses. And those who use swizzle sticks to defizz their champagne are not to be tolerated. “People who do not care for bubbles would do better to order a still champagne to begin with.”

Under $15

THE PLAYERS by Tex Mau/e. 238 pages. New American Library. $15.

Through nine years of professional football, the great running back Jim Brown never suffered a serious leg injury. He did it, reports SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Senior Editor Tex Maule, by keeping his feet close to the ground while he ran, eschewing the fancy high knee action of many another runner. To Quarterback Norman Van Brocklin, there was an even better way to stay healthy: not run at all. “A quarterback should only run through sheer terror,” is his advice. Whatever their personal credos, the football pros are a unique, often amusing bunch, as demonstrated by this informed, dramatically illustrated story of how the game is played.

GREAT ART TREASURES IN AMERICA’S SMALLER MUSEUMS by the editors of Country Beautiful. 194 pages. Pufnam. $12.95.

Outside the major metropolitan museums lie many imposing works of art—Sargent’s vibrantly Andalusian El Jaleo in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Inness’ muted landscape Winter Morning, Montclair in the Montclair, N.J., Art Museum, Utrillo’s gouache Eglise de St. Bernard in the University of Arizona Art Gallery, or any other of the 200 here. Text by the University of Chicago’s Harold Haydon.

DRAWING by Daniel M. Mendelowitz. 464 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $11.95.

This is an exception to the usual run of art books in that it is not overpriced, nor just an eclectic collection of plates designed for display, but a pertinently illustrated history of drawing that would be useful both to the artist and someone who merely likes to draw. Professor Mendelowitz of Stanford is no more pedantic than he has to be in discussing media, periods and styles. Perhaps unnecessarily he points out that “the common lead pencil is misnamed, for it is made of graphite, a crystalline form of carbon having a greasy texture.” It is also a slippery instrument in the hands of those who take drawing as lightly as it is taken today. Drawing has had its great days—the Renaissance, the 18th and 19th centuries —but it is impossible to doubt that the pop art of, say, Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923) represents anything but a descent from the anonymous caveman who drew bison and deer with a masterly hand perhaps 15,000 years ago.

THE HOUSE IN MY HEAD by Dorothy Rodgers. 254 pages. Atheneum. $10.

The wife of Composer Richard Rodgers, a former professional interior decorator, gives a step-by-step account of how she built her dream house. The story has an irresistible fairy-tale aura, and her menus are as excellent as those in her previous book (My Favorite Things), although many a gourmet will be sorely wounded by her continuing and total aversion to garlic.

THE PEOPLES OF KENYA by Joy Adamson. 400 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $9.75.

This book is by the author of Born Free, Living Free and Forever Free, but it is quite different. Before writing those animal stories, Joy Adamson had taught herself to paint and then, for more than six years, lived among the many tribes of Kenya. In hundreds of her paintings and photographs, she presents the people and their customs. Many of the ceremonies—for example, circumcision rites—have never before been observed by a white witness, and anthropologists as well as the nonspecialist reader will find much that is unusual. Among other things, the Adamson enterprise is sure to lead to some fresh thinking about the African future and the inevitable clash between Westernization and tribal contentment.

PICTORIAL GUIDE TO THE AAAAAAAALS OF NORTH AMERICA by Leonard Lee Rue ///. 299 pages. Crowe//. $7.95.

The photographs are monochrome and offset-reproduced, and the prose is conservationist and sternly isolationist, not to say jaunty in a scoutmasterly fashion. However, 65 of the 375 species of mammals in America—north of the Rio Grande—are given knowledgeable biographies by an industrious naturalist. Leonard Lee Rue III knows more than other authorities, including Larousse, will let on about the American opossum: Did anyone else know that an infant opossum is the size of a pencil eraser, while a whole litter of 16 would not fill a teaspoon? Most backward and unfortunate of all American mammals, Mother usually has only a dozen teats. What happens to the odd opossums? They are dropouts.