Books: Deck the Shelves for $4.95 and Up

A Christmas of art, nature, history and chuckles

OVER $75

Giorgio Vasari was the Boswell of the 16th century art world. He was also its Sammy Glick. As a painter and architect he outhustled many of his betters for commissions in the courts of Florence, Rome, Naples and Bologna. Vasari had an inflated opinion of his talent as a painter, so it is something of an irony that he is remembered chiefly for his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, an informal, even gossipy collection of biographical studies of the great and near great of Italian art. This boxed three-volume re-edition, translated by Gaston Du C. de Vere (Abrams; 2323 pages; $225), is of high quality on the inside with gemlike tip-ins, though a touch tacky on the outside with spines of imitation leather. Real cloth would have been classier.

In 1894 a surplus of ivory coming out of the Congo prompted the Belgian government to offer the material free to sculptors. Many accepted, and the ivory statuette soon stood tall in the art deco movement. Isadora Duncan by Alberto Savinio (Franco Maria Ricci; 184 pages; $125) shows just how exquisite some of these miniature sculptures became. All works pictured here were inspired, in one way or another, by the blithe spirit of American Dancer Isadora Duncan. Artists like Demeter Chiparus and Friederich Preiss, whose names are familiar today only to collectors, shaped ivory as if it were butter; the dancing figures they carved were adorned with bronze and stood or reclined on bases of marble or onyx. Many of the statuettes hover at the brink of kitsch, but their brilliant colors and glowing surfaces (clearly reproduced in the tipped-in illustrations) must be seen to be believed.

From their printing shop in Lower Manhattan, Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives taught 19th century America to see itself. Their lithographs re-created urban and rural growth, disasters, the opening of the West and a vast anthology of occupations and pastimes. The Great Book of Currier & Ives' America by Walton Rawls (Abbeville Press; 488 pages; $85) is ponderous to heft but impossible to put down. Author Rawls' text is a lively history of these remarkable illustrators, their entrepreneurial triumphs and their battles with an alarming new enemy, the photograph. Better still are the more than 400 illustrations, culled from the 7,000-plus — lithographs that Currier & Ives issued.

Kilims, or flat-woven rugs, have long been considered the s poor relatives of the Oriental knotted pile rugs that have proved to be one of the best —though specialized—hedges against inflation in recent years. Kilims by Yanni Petsopoulos with Michael Franses (Rizzoli; 394 pages; $85) gives these weavings their proper due. It should be welcomed by both collectors and decorators, the former because the author has provided clear and much needed scholarship on origins and techniques, the latter because of the rare and glorious examples of kilims from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Persia that are reproduced in the book's spectacular color photos.

$30-$75