A Shelf of Season's Readings

New volumes celebrate nature, history and art

OVER $100

Jose Alcina Franch, professor of American anthropology at the University of Madrid, combines scholarship and a curatorial eye to produce Pre-Columbian Art (Abrams; 614 pages; $125). Franch provides a systematic survey of the once powerful civilizations that flourished in Mexico and Central and South America before 16th century Spaniards spread destruction in their frenzy for New World gold. Pre-Columbian art, the author notes, drew on a staggering variety of mythologic forms. Similarities between the designs of ancient America and Asia are not coincidental; prehistoric migrations apparently carried the seeds of cultures halfway round the world. In addition to illustrations of artifacts, the book offers a section on the main pre-Columbian sites that armchair archaeologists will find irresistible.

When a mania for art nouveau swept over Europe in the 1890s, Louis Comfort Tiffany was ready with an American version of the new style. The 88 color plates in The Lamps of Tiffany Studios (Abrams; 178 pages; $120) demonstrate the distinctive artistry of the designer, who used 5,000 colors and textures of glass to confect his fanciful, flower-bedecked shades. For 40 years his Long Island foundries turned out the lamps that cast a gaudy glow in U.S. homes. Then Tiffany objects went out of style, and in the early 1930s their creator went bankrupt. In the late 1950s an art nouveau boom sent dealers scouring the attics of old mansions and manors for castoff Tiffany lamps. Would-be collectors may weep: a lamp much like Cobweb, which originally cost about $500, fetched a record $360,000 at auction three years ago.

$60-$100

The Smithsonian Institution is the repository of national memory. In the celebrated Air and Space Museum, the frail craft that the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C., hovers near the command module of Apollo 11, which first put man on the moon. In the Museum of American History are the portable desk that Thomas Jefferson designed and then used while writing the Declaration of Independence, the original Star-Spangled Banner from Fort McHenry, Md., and one of the first Teddy bears, approved by Teddy Roosevelt himself. Treasures of the Smithsonian by Edwards Park (Smithsonian Books; ($60) is a grand but personal tour of these and all the other Smithsonian collections, including such exotic arrays as the Freer Gallery's elegant Orientalia and the rich lode of artifacts in the Museum of African Art. It is sobering to realize that the treasures that gleam from these 470 pages are a mere sample of the national attic's contents.

"Vaticana bibis, bibis venenum," wrote the Roman satirist Martial in the 1st century: "Drink Vatican and you drink poison." Martial was writing of the wine produced in the neighborhood, which at the time was more famous as the site of the Vatican Circus, where Nero threw Christians to the lions after the great fire that swept Rome in A.D. 64. On such engaging historical notes opens The Vatican (Abrams; 398 pages; $60), a book that will do much to fill in the fragmentary picture that even dedicated travelers take away from this tiny (108 acres) yet labyrinthine city-state. This is an illuminating and often candid guide. All the famous sights are here, but so are crannies like the Teutonic Cemetery, a burial place for pilgrims since the time of Charlemagne.

$25-$50

Emil Schulthess, an internationally renowned photographer, has produced a remarkable book of aerial views that portray his native country in all its contradictory beauty. For Swiss Panorama (Knopf; $50) he used a specially designed remote-control camera suspended from a helicopter to make color pictures that are almost three-dimensional in effect. The pictures, some shot from above 20,000 ft., are breathtaking in clarity and detail; in a shot of the legendary Piz Palue, fresh marks of alpinists' climbing irons are clearly visible. Swiss Panorama ranges from cloud-topped peaks and neatly patterned farmland to well-preserved medieval communities and bustling modern cities like Basel and Zurich. Schulthess has a taste for fierce, melodramatic peaks, but even his photographs cannot stifle the ultimate feeling that Switzerland always evokes; happily, it remains at bottom what Hermann Hesse said of Appenzell: "Sunday country."

There is no reason in economic history why the American cowboy ought to be any more interesting than, say, the American steelworker or coal miner. Yet in some complex translation of reality into the collective American myth, the cowboy became a national ideal, the symbol of civilized individualism riding west. The state of the cowboy myth became a gauge of American values, of the way that the nation envisioned good guys and bad guys: the wholesomely, vapidly manly Buck Jones-Tom Mix model gave way to a post-World War II demigod. John Wayne, who had none of the old sweet prissiness and was not afraid of the uses of power. Wayne gave way during the Viet Nam era to Clint Eastwood, the high plains drifter with an almost reptilian indifference to death suffered or inflicted. Cowboy: The Enduring Myth of the Wild West (Stewart, Tabori & Chang; 431 pages; $50) is richly shrewd about the actuality and legend of cowboys, doing justice to both in a commentary by Russell Martin and in photographs that are by turns haunting and as garish as Technicolor.

Nineteenth century travel photographers used chemicals and light to catch distant realities upon a collodion wet plate and bear them home in velvet-lined boxes to London or New York. It was a cumbersome wizardry that they practiced, lumbering across Mexico or Africa in darkroom wagons. In desert heat they crawled under layers of blankets, into lightless black bags, to change their photographic plates. When a photographer named Captain Payer was taking pictures in Egypt for the Viceroy in 1863, the fellahin thought that his camera was a Pandora's box, and-that his black bellows contained cholera; they smashed the whole instrument. But the rewards of pioneering photographic work could be magic indeed. Masters of Early Travel Photography (Vendome; 352 pages; $50) is a handsome, sepia-tinted sampler of 177 early photographs--small curios and enormous vistas, tattooed men and mountain ranges--taken by adventurers in Egypt, Japan, Brazil, India, China and that most exotic arena of all, the vanished American West.

They came from prisons, posh suburbs, lunatic asylums and nursing homes. But they had one common trait: originality. Their art, generously displayed in American Folk Art of the Twentieth Century (Rizzoli; 342 pages; $45) shows astonishing visual power and aesthetic range. Eddie Arning, for example, who spent more than 60 years in a Texas mental institution, contributes eerie, compelling images that resemble Egyptian friezes. Inez Nathaniel Walker began drawing disquietingly grotesque portraits in prison. "There were all those bad girls talking dirty all the time," she recalls, "so I just sit down at a table and draw." All the artists' works are in museums or private collections.

Small invertebrate segmented animals, say the dictionaries. The Audubon Society Book of Insects (Abrams; 283 pages; $50) offers a more generous definition of the six-legged creatures: "Fellow inhabitants of our fragile planet earth." But what fellows! Bombardiers and borers, water sprites, builders and architects, singers and aviators all fly, hop and crawl through the pages of this extraordinary zoo without screens. A commonplace grasshopper on a black-eyed Susan takes on the dazzle of a Van Gogh landscape; a mangrove glows like a Christmas tree as thousands of fireflies illuminate its heavy branches. The text, by Naturalists Lorus and Margery Milne, is full of felicities: "It is often the inconspicuous [insects] that have the greatest impact on civilization . . . The world feels right when we hear a cricket chirping." But it is the glowing pictures (by some 40 photographers) that provide the enchantment of this year's wildest bestiary.

"It is a vanished but not vanquished world," says Roman Vishniac of the German and Eastern European Jewish communities he photographed on the eve of the Holocaust. In A Vanished World (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 180 pages; $49.95) a doomed people are brought to life. The faces are unforgettable; wide-eyed children in Hebrew schools, a wise elder peering over his glasses, a handsome singer in a Hasidic choir. Many of the pictures reflect anti-Semitic repression in pre-war Poland and Germany. In one photo, Vishniac's little daughter is posed beside a Berlin shop window displaying a demoniac device that purported to measure the difference between Aryan and non-Aryan skulls. Most of the subjects were unwilling to be photographed, so Vishniac hid his camera, first from the Jews but then from the Nazis. In a moving foreword, Novelist Elie Wiesel calls Vishniac the "poet of memory." It is an even more apt title than the one adorning this haunting and invaluable work.

Film Historian Ted Sennett has brought together almost 400 stills, from The Birth of a Nation to E.T., to illustrate his selection of Hollywood's "great" films, Readers may quarrel with some selections in Great Hollywood Movies (Abrams; 304 pages; $49.50) "and wonder why other films were left out, but no one can argue with the wonderful, and often provocative, pictures that Sennett has lovingly collected.

Many, of course, are familiar: Paul Henreid lighting Bette Davis' cigarette in Now, Voyager, a hungry Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert waiting for a lift in It Happened One Night, a mad Gloria Swanson posing for the cameras in her final scene of Sunset Boulevard. Others come as welcome surprises. There is a very young (26) Gary Cooper making an early film appearance in Wings (1927), and in a still from The Picture of Dorian Gray, we finally see what Dorian's naughty escapades did to that portrait in his attic. Sennett has the perhaps obligatory shot of James Cagney pushing a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face from The Public Enemy, for example, but he also reproduced the film's less familiar last scene: Cagney's dead body lying at his brother's feet. Such surprises not only make for great movies, but for good books about great movies.

The vitality, the beauty and sometimes the ugliness of New York City have inspired artists for more than two centuries. Childe Hassam rendered his vision of Manhattan in a snowstorm in soft, impressionistic tones; Edward Hopper looked at an empty office and caught the sense of anomie that the city sometimes inspires; Piet Mondrian captured Manhattan's pulsing rhythms in his unique rectilinear style. To show the many sides of New York, Graphic Artist Seymour Chwast and Steven Heller, art director of the New York Times Book Review, have collected the work of these three artists and 93 others and blended them in The Art of New York (Abrams; 191 pages; $49.50). This handsome volume combines the familiar and the rare to form a portrait of life in the world's greatest--and most exasperating--city. Potential visitors who are afraid of being mugged can sit at home and admire the works of such artists as Ben Shahn, George Bellows and Saul Steinberg. The more venturesome will take one look at these master works, buy a subway token and go out to see the subject for themselves. Both visitors and natives will find the book delightful.

With a wistful look backward, Quilts from the Indiana Amish (Dutton; 88 pages; $25.95) pays homage to needleworkers as obscure as they were gifted. Set against dark backgrounds, these geometrical textiles display a colorist's palette and an artisan's virtuosity. Anna Miller's muted Flower Baskets (1917), whose variations are worked in shades of blue, mauve and rust, and Lydia Bontrager's more exuberant Fans (circa 1920), executed in undulating ribbons of color, are works that transcend their origins; intended for daily use, they became grace notes to domesticity.

In that tradition, Painter Charlotte Robinson launched the Quilt Project in 1975, inspired by the United Nations' Year of the Woman. Documented in The Artist & the Quilt (Knopf; 144 pages; $24.95), this fruitful collaboration of 18 painters and sculptors paired with 16 needleworkers produced 20 fresh and striking works. Even when they recall oldtime bedcovers, like Sculptor Lynda Benglis' and Quilter Amy Chamberlin's Patang, a reminiscence of kite flying, the works are as contemporary as modern sculptures. Some quitters developed new techniques: Bonnie Persinger caught the flowing rhythm of Robinson's The Blue Nile by devising ways to work with organdy. Several artists chose their own seamstresses; Rosemary Wright sought out family members she had not seen in years to sew their autobiographical The Mitchell Family Quilt. In each case, the textile has helped to revive an outmoded genre. In art, apparently, nothing is as new as the old.

When Naturalist-Author Hal Borland died in 1978, he left a shelf of more than 30 books, as well as thousands of "outdoor editorials" written over a period of 36 years for the Sunday New York Times. He also left the text of a volume intended as a celebration of America's trees. A Countryman's Woods (Knopf; 184 pages; $25) was completed by Borland's friend and sometime collaborator Les Line, editor of Audubon magazine, who also took the handsome color photographs that illustrate it. Borland's relaxed, graceful prose mixes botanical information (the intricate unfolding of shagbark hickory buds), historical oddities (the Midwestern pioneers who used large, hollow sycamores as barns or even dwellings), homely anecdotes (the willow posts in a neighbor's fence that took root and grew into a row of trees), and vivid turns of phrase (the black spruce needles that grow all around the twig "like the hair on the tail of an angry cat"). Borland's concern for conservation is all the more effective for its understatement, as when he quietly notes that the scientist who measured the age of a California bristlecone pine at approximately 5,000 years cut it down in the process, thus destroying "the oldest living thing on earth, so far as we know at this time."

"How long ago is it?--80-odd years." Those were Abraham Lincoln's words, spoken to a crowd gathered around the White House on a July evening in 1863, just after the crucial Union victory at Gettysburg. He would use the same thought, transformed into the rather more memorable "Four score and seven years ago" to open his address dedicating the cemetery at Gettysburg the following November. This engaging anecdote is just one of the many historical delights in A New Birth of Freedom: Lincoln at Gettysburg by Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. (Little, Brown; 263 pages; $22.50). Kunhardt is a superb scene setter. He reminds the reader that Henry Ford was born in 1863, but the nation was still young enough to "remember the faces and handshakes of its founding fathers." And he was able to tap a trove of evocative Lincolin-era photographs to illustrate the book: the Meserve Collection, begun by his grandfather Frederick Hill Meserve and continued by his mother, Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt.

"I like to direct my subjects and tell them exactly what to do," says Antony Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowdon, in his introduction to Sittings 1979-1983 (Harper & Row; 144 pages; $20). That would account for the cool air of calculated informality that distinguishes these photographs, mostly of figures in the arts and public life of Britain. But Snowdon adds: "Often when people are told exactly what to do they become more themselves than they know." And that would explain the glint of pawky self-dramatization in many of the poses: Prince Charles sporting his riding silks with 18th century aplomb; Novelist Iris Murdoch slumped back in a chair, wrapped in a scarf, head cocked appraisingly; Actor Alec Guinness leaning jauntily against a tree, wearing a rakish peasant hat. The lighting is soft and natural throughout; the camera's gaze is direct and steady (and it is returned just as steadily by most of the subjects). Snowdon has mastered an elegance that never loses its simplicity. Indeed, in his best portraits--for instance, a serene, Vermeer-like study of the elderly Lady Mosley, one of the Milford sisters--the two qualities intensify each other.

The word carousel, Tobin Fraley informs us, is derived from the old Italian carosello, meaning tournament. The term came to refer to the medieval Moorish practice of training mounted swordsmen on wooden horses attached to circling beams. In The Carousel Animal (Zephyr; 127 pages; $19.95) Fraley, an Oakland, Calif, restorer of antique merry-go-round animals, closes the distance between this forgotten martial art and the magic of the amusement park. Gary Sinick's photographs of stallions frozen in mid-prance, oversize rabbits, frogs and chickens reveal the wealth of detail and coloration that distinguished the finest carousel craftsmen of the U.S. and Europe. The form gave wide latitude to the imagination. English Carver C.J. Spooner, for example, commemorated British heroes of the Boer War with a series of centaurs. Among them: a figure that is half horse and half General Robert S.S. Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. qed This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.