For the Eye’s Delight

The bookstores are bright as ever this year with books fine enough to ransom a king or satisfy the most demanding of tastes or simply be what King Alfred would have called a mathum, or gift as gift, “something for which there is no immediate use,” as J. R. R. Tolkien defines it, “but which one is unwilling to throw away.” Fancifully illustrated texts of middling seriousness turn up with greater prominence than before. There is Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols (Doubleday $12.95) which is not by Jung (the preface is) but by a committee of his disciples, who have gathered some five hundred illustrations of archetypes and such. Louis MacNeice’s Astrology, also from Doubleday ($9.95), is a similar book, and as hard a one to put down, if your eye is at all caught by mysteriously arranged pictures as disjunct as those of a magazine.

Practically any subject is considered eligible for this polychrome dressing up, and we find the thickly illustrated Larousse Encyclopaedia of Renaissance and Baroque Art (Putnam’s, $15.95) and Larousse Encyclopedia of Modem History (Harper & Row, $20). There’s also the distinguished Italian critic Mario Praz’s An Illustrated History of Furnishing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Braziller, $25), The American Heritage History of World War I (Simon and Schuster, $16.50), and Sacheverell Sitwell’s Great Palaces of Europe (Putnam’s, $19.95).

GD

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Guy Davenport

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The bookstores are bright as ever this year with books fine enough to ransom a king or satisfy the most demanding of tastes or simply be what King Alfred would have called a mathum, or gift as gift, “something for which there is no immediate use,” as J. R. R. Tolkien defines it, “but which one is unwilling to throw away.” Fancifully illustrated texts of middling seriousness turn up with greater prominence than before. There is Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols (Doubleday $12.95) which is not by Jung (the preface is) but by a committee of his disciples, who have gathered some five hundred illustrations of archetypes and such. Louis MacNeice’s Astrology, also from Doubleday ($9.95), is a similar book, and as hard a one to put down, if your eye is at all caught by mysteriously arranged pictures as disjunct as those of a magazine.

Practically any subject is considered eligible for this polychrome dressing up, and we find the thickly illustrated Larousse Encyclopaedia of Renaissance and Baroque Art (Putnam’s, $15.95) and Larousse Encyclopedia of Modem History (Harper & Row, $20). There’s also the distinguished Italian critic Mario Praz’s An Illustrated History of Furnishing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Braziller, $25), The American Heritage History of World War I (Simon and Schuster, $16.50), and Sacheverell Sitwell’s Great Palaces of Europe (Putnam’s, $19.95).