Books: PRESENTATION PIECES

MOST gift books are glossy of cover, bland of content, irreproachably expensive. They are intended to flatter rather than to instruct or entertain.

But books can make fine gifts. Herewith a sampling of costlier presentation pieces that deserve to be read (or looked at), not just given.

LAROUSSE GASTRONOMIQUE, by Prosper Montagné (1,101 pp.; Crown: $20). In this large, well-illustrated American edition of the famous French encyclopedia of food and cooking are recipes for almost everything edible, definitions of culinary terms, and such curiosa as a description of what Louis XIV liked to eat for dinner (the fifth course consisted of various fresh-water fish cooked in pastry, and was intended to remove the taste of the larks, ortolans, thrushes, capons, woodcocks, young turkeys, young hares, sweetbreads, ham, forcemeats, hot pâtés and fritures that had preceded it). Its completeness may be judged from the fact that it contains not only an entry for alligator pear (under avocado) but one for alligator: "The most valued parts of the reptile are the paws or flappers . . . prepared á L'américaine [or] á L'indienne."

WHAT'S GOT YOUR BACK UP? by Bill Mouldin (146 pp.; Harper; $3.95). Herblock is clearly Mauldin's master and Daumier his god; this collection of his work proves that he has edged past the one and is moving determinedly, in quality of line and force of wit, toward the other. The best cartoon book of the season.

MASTERPIECES OF JAPANESE SCULPTURE, with text by J. Edward Kidder Jr. (328 pp.; Tuttle; $27.50). A large, well-illustrated historical survey; the photographs, most of them black and white, are superb, and the compilers have broken up what might have been a tedious procession of figures with excellent detailed closeups. The subjects, of course, run to delicate, serene Buddhas and wrathy temple guards, and they are delightful.

THE ARTS OF ASSYRIA, by André Parrot (383 pp.; Golden Press; $25). The extraordinary book-by-book progress through the history of art, proposed by France's Minister of Culture André Malraux and begun this year in the superb volume Sumer: The Dawn of Art (TIME, June 2), is continued with an equally lavish book on Assyria. The grim, skilled art of the warrior peoples who fought in the Mesopotamian valleys—it includes magnificent lion hunts as well as gloomy strings of captives—has never been presented better. Familiar bas-reliefs are well done in black and white, and quite unfamiliar wall paintings are reproduced, for the first time in any book, in excellent color. The moody, beautifully tinted paintings were discovered and copied by a French expedition in 1929.

THE SHIP, by Björn Landström (309 pp.; Doubleday; $14.95). For most boys and a few fortunate men, among life's compelling questions are the position of the guns of Nelson's Victory, the difference between a galleon and a galeass, and the vexing matter of how oars were banked on biremes. With authoritative information or thoughtful supposition, Author Landström deals with such matters in a magnificent history of man's water conveyances, from the dugout to the nuclear submarine. The handsome sectional and perspective drawings are his own.