Books: Christmas Avalanche

Book publishers understandably tend to save their richest and most expensive books for the Christmas season. Color reproduction improves yearly, and there are few places any more where the roving camera is denied entrance. The result is an avalanche of big books, bedazzling to the eye and bewildering to the judgment of the hurried shopper. Herewith a guide to the best among them:

GUNS by Dudley Pope. 254 pages. Delacorte. $20. The first known cannon, which resembled a funeral urn, barked some six centuries ago. Mankind has since improved the methods of mass destruction with an ingenuity that becomes distressingly evident in these pages. As early as 1453, the Turks lobbed 800-lb. shells at the walls of Constantinople. The revolver, the rifled barrel and the machine gun all date from the 17th century or earlier. By the early 1800s there were carved pistols that fired around corners and a cannonball that burst just beyond the muzzle into honed sword blades—a rude forerunner of the grenade. Dudley Pope, a naval historian and author of several books, has drafted a text of deadly fascination, set off by 350 illustrations that begin with the invention of gunpowder and end with the armaments of World War II.

LENINGRAD by Nigel Gosling. 252 pages. Dutton. $25. Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg, lies on the bleak landscape of Communist Russia like an ornate brooch, a city unexpectedly and astonishingly brilliant with its canals and palaces and blue-and-white cathedrals and marble statues and gilded domes glinting in the wintry sun. Author Gosling, art critic of London’s Observer, and Photographer Colin Jones have successfully limned the luminous city built by that savage giant, Peter the Great (1672-1725), along the soggy shores of the Neva. It became the seat of the czars and of Russian culture; Pushkin,

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov all gathered there. Today, as Photographer Jones’s camera reveals, Leningrad’s drab citizens move through Leningrad’s loveliness like trespassers.

EVEREST: THE WEST RIDGE by Thomas F. Hornbein. 198 pages. Sierra Club. $25. The sheer sight of Mount Everest, its 29,028-ft. summit supporting the roof of the world, strikes awe in the hearts of mountaineers and non-mountaineers alike. It is a pity that this otherwise magnificent full-color photographic record of the 1963 U.S. expedition includes only one full portrait of the mountain, and that a distant one. The book also could have supplied a map tracing the Americans’ course, as well as the routes of the two other successful climbs, the first being the British expedition of 1953. Even so, these 90 color plates rank among the best ever taken of any climb. Dr. Hornbein, a member of the expedition, wrote the text from his diary and from tapes recorded on Everest’s vertiginous flanks.

FASHION by Mila Contini. 321 pages. Odyssey. $12.95. After studying haute couture from the Pharaohs forward, Signora Contini, an Italian journalist, concludes that women dress that way to entice men. Her verdict is scarcely as edifying as the 550 illustrations, which show that nearly every current style has ancient ancestry. Nefertiti’s pleated tunic would draw envious stares at a Met opening night. Roman women carried collapsible umbrellas. In 18th century France coiffures soared higher than they do in today’s discotheques.

LA BELLE FRANCE. 300 pages. Golden Press. $19.95. Where do cookbooks go? Into the kitchen, behind a cabinet door, to collect smears of bacon fat and to be consulted only at moments of cu linary need. This cookbook, prepared by the editors of Réaltiés magazine in Paris, breaks all the rules. La Belle France divides Gaul into ten.regions, each with its own spécialtiés—Normandy for cheeses, Alsace-Lorraine for the richest pâté—and brings the tour to life with a host of savory photographs of the locale, many in color, that should keep the book out of the kitchen and in the living room, where it belongs. Its 400 recipes, tested by Alfred Guérot, late president of the World Federation of Culinary Societies, and other Gallic gastronomes, plot delectable journeys to specific gourmet delights, which invariably taste better in French (Potée à la Bourguignonne, for instance, is nothing but humble pork stew).

FAMILY by Margaret Mead. 208 pages. Macmillan. $10. The strength of this book is its simplicity. Under such broad headings as Mothers, Fathers, The Child Alone, Friends and Adolescents, Anthropologist Margaret Mead has distilled a lifetime’s wisdom about that most enduring of human institutions, the family. She cannot resist pontificating a bit, but the photographs by Photographer Ken Heyman make up for it. Taken over seven years in many countries for just this book, they say more, and say it better, than the text.

AUTOMOBILES AND AUTOMOBILING by Pierre Dumont, Ronald Barker and Douglas B. Tubbs. 204 pages. Viking. $28.50. By the authors’ reckoning, the Golden Age of automobiling began with the century in France, and ended 25 years ago. That period embraces a time when the finest cars were designed, fueled and driven with love and care—the same emotions that produced this book. The most youthful entry in Illustrator Dumont’s four-color catalogue of conveyances is the Packard 180, a rakish coupé de ville last manufactured in 1940. Otherwise, the handcrafted bodies on display here are now preserved only in automobile museums and the hearts of car buffs: a 1913 Alfa with a perfect teardrop chassis and porthole windows, an all-tulipwood, copper-riveted 1924 Hispano-Suiza. Accompanying vintage photographs recapture the era when all motorists looked like Mr. Toad, streamlining was called “wind-cheating,” and a determined cyclist could overtake a racing car in the Bois de Boulogne.

THE FIFTY-THREE STAGES OF THE TOKAIDO by Hiroshige. 123 pages. East-West Center Press. $10.50. Hiroshige, a fireman’s son who died in 1858, spent years carving in cherrywood the 53 stages or stops along the Tokaido, the Emperor’s Road that winds 250 sea-clinging miles from Kyoto to Tokyo. These incomparable woodblock prints, here reproduced in Hiroshige’s own bold colors and almost to the original size (about 9 in. by 14 in.) make a significant and sometimes neglected point: what the artist deliberately omits the enchanted viewer will supply.

THE ART OF THE PUPPET by Bil Baird. 251 pages. Macmillan. $17-50. Puppeteer Bil Baird’s book is not a history but an appreciation of the theatrical form whose genesis, lost in time, goes back thousands of years. Punch and Judy were born before Diarist Samuel Pepys, who watched their antics in the 17th century. Punch’s ancestor, a hook-nosed Turkish bully named Karaghioz, preceded him by several centuries. The special exaggerated magic of the marionette, which lives only in the minds of its spectators and often requires three human puppeteers to give it movement, is affectionately evoked by a man who has been quickening his own mannequins for 40 years.

For book lovers who prefer to do their browsing at home, there are gift books produced by foreign publishers, and made available only through the International Book Society (a division of Time Inc.). Prospective buyers must apply for membership (free) and order by mail. Best of the current offerings:

PRIVATE VIEW by Bryan Robertson, John Russell and Lord Snowdon. 298 pages. Nelson. $18. Lord Snowdon’s marriage to Princess Margaret has not interrupted his professional career. His camera plays with lively, inventive and sometimes mischievous effect on the faces and figures that comprise Britain’s art establishment. On a pedestal in the basement of the Tate Gallery, surrounded by cocooned statues that have fallen from public favor, sits Sir John Rothenstein, looking a bit discarded himself (he was on the eve of retirement as the Tate’s director). Britain’s new generation of artists are shown in their untidy studio lairs, and although their names may not resonate beyond art circles, Lord Snowdon brings them all very much to life. The artists are represented by specimens of their work, many in color. Text by Bryan Robertson, director of London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, and Art Critic John Russell of the London Sunday Times.

THE VOYAGES OF ULYSSES. 261 pages.

Herdar Freiburg. $19. When Troy fell 3,000 years ago, the warrior Odysseus, king of Ithaca, set sail for home. The direct route was only 550 miles, but Odysseus was b’own all over the Mediterranean, took te’n years to reach his native land. Homer first recorded the voyagers’ adventures in his epic poem The Odyssey. Now Photographer Erich Lessing has trained his camera on the very scenes that may have met the voyagers’ astonished eyes: the shores of Djerba, off the Tunisian Coast, where Odysseus—here given his Roman name of Ulysses—tarried among the Lotus Eaters; the brooding Lake Avernus in Italy, where he descended into the Underworld; the bay of Port Vathy, where at last the voyage ended on the sands of home. Lessing has overburdened his superb pictures with too much borrowed text. The Homeric passages that embellish the pictures would have sufficed.

GREAT TAPESTRIES, edited by Joseph Jobe. 278 pages. Edita, S.A. $22.50. In medieval times, tapestries were functional: they hid the bleak stone expanses of chateau walls, and their woolen thickness helped keep out the cold. But utility can lead to art, and the art of weaving came to its finest flower in the textured murals that are sumptuously spread through these pages with such fidelity that the beholder wants to touch them. The book’s first three sections explore the history of tapestry weaving, a history still being written by those—among them Lurçat, at and Miró—who have revived this ancient art. The fourth and last section, by François Tabard, master weaver at Aubusson in France, explains the techniques.