Books: Holiday Hoard

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Anybody who gets a gift book for Christmas may conclude that a thousand pictures are almost too much for words. As usual, the gift volumes offered this year emphasize photographs and reproductions; and they are, on the whole, delights to the eye. A few of the volumes also challenge the mind, thanks to out-of-the-way subjects, and many of them certainly challenge the checkbook. These are the standouts, graded by price:

Over $30

THE KARIYE DJAMI by Paul A. Underwood. 1,208 pages. Pantheon. $55 for the boxed set of three volumes. After the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks plastered over the frescoes and mosaics in the Church of the Monastery of the Chora, perched on a hillside above the Bosporus. It served devout Moslems as the Mosque of Kariye Djami until 1948, when the building was secularized and the Byzantine Institute of the U.S. began the delicate work of cleaning and restoring the art works. Volume I contains a historical introduction and a description of the mosaics and frescoes, which are pictured in Volumes II and III. It is a magnificently rendered work; the free-flowing figures, the bold and imaginative use of color and the naiveté and charm of some subjects do much to support those art historians who claim that the Italian Renaissance was fathered by exiled Byzantine painters.

THE COUNCIL by Lothar Wolleh. 121 pages. Viking. $38.50. An oversized (17 in. by 13 in.), baroquely beautiful record of Vatican II. The text, succinct and printed in large type, is not particularly arresting, but the color photos are.

FRENCH DRAWINGS by Maurice Serullaz. 232 pages. New York Graphic Society. $37.50. An engaging trip through 19th century France as seen by artists from Prud'hon to Daumier. The book includes three drawings by Novelist Victor Hugo, who painted as fast and furiously as he wrote— leaving behind about 450 pictures when he died. Hugo's riverscape is delicate and brooding, his ample nude is created with a few bold strokes. Other subjects range from classical to genre, and, typically, the plates begin with a love scene and end with a disputation between doctors as death steals away with their patient.

$20 to $30

MOTOR CARS OF THE GOLDEN PAST by Ken W. Purdy. 216 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $30. A nostalgic look at the days when now-vanished beauties such as the Apperson Jack Rabbit, the Pierce Arrow, the Willis Sainte Claire and the Stutz Bearcat tore up American roads. The vintage year was 1929, with its Kissel White Eagle, the Graham-Paige 837 with skirted fenders, the boat-tailed Auburn roadster and the dual-cowled Duesenberg phaeton. Park a while and reminisce.

SPAIN, A HISTORY IN ART by Bradley Smith. 296 pages. Simon & Schuster. $30. An explosion of color that richly and often wittily tells the complicated story of Spain's long journey from obscurity (TIME, Jan. 21). The somber Iberian chord is struck again and again—in El Greco's haunted saints and cities, Goya's grim disasters of war, processions of penitents flogging themselves and one another. Appropriately, the final plate is Picasso's brush drawing of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.