In Striped Paper and Red Ribbon

Last Christmas we had a Thoreauvian book of great beauty to admire, Eliot Porter’s In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, in which passages from Walden and the notebooks were illustrated with perfectly matching photographs. This year we can have, after fifty-seven years of inaccessibility, the great, walnut-rich notebooks themselves. Dover has managed, with no loss to legibility, to reprint all fourteen volumes of the Journals as two folio volumes, arranging four of the original pages to their one page. The effect is pleasant and handsome, but the importance lies in having available again this inexhaustibly interesting record of Thoreau’s daily meditations, as delightful to the visual imagination as to the mind. The original Herbert Gleason photographs are included, and Walter Harding has contributed a new introduction ($20).

One of the runaway successes of the season has been the New York Graphic Society’s Tutankhamen, by Christine Desroches Noblecourt ($15). The color photography is by F. L. Kennett, and there are seventy-five color plates. New York Graphic has also published Leonard Cottrell’s Realms of Gold, A Journey in Search of the Mycenaeans ($5.95), one of the many excellent archeological studies among this year’s gift books. And to put beside it on the shelf there is Margaret Scherer’s The Legends of Troy (Phaidon, $7.50), which gathers together illustrations of the Trojan myths from antiquity to the present.

GD

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Guy Davenport

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Last Christmas we had a Thoreauvian book of great beauty to admire, Eliot Porter’s In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, in which passages from Walden and the notebooks were illustrated with perfectly matching photographs. This year we can have, after fifty-seven years of inaccessibility, the great, walnut-rich notebooks themselves. Dover has managed, with no loss to legibility, to reprint all fourteen volumes of the Journals as two folio volumes, arranging four of the original pages to their one page. The effect is pleasant and handsome, but the importance lies in having available again this inexhaustibly interesting record of Thoreau’s daily meditations, as delightful to the visual imagination as to the mind. The original Herbert Gleason photographs are included, and Walter Harding has contributed a new introduction ($20).

One of the runaway successes of the season has been the New York Graphic Society’s Tutankhamen, by Christine Desroches Noblecourt ($15). The color photography is by F. L. Kennett, and there are seventy-five color plates. New York Graphic has also published Leonard Cottrell’s Realms of Gold, A Journey in Search of the Mycenaeans ($5.95), one of the many excellent archeological studies among this year’s gift books. And to put beside it on the shelf there is Margaret Scherer’s The Legends of Troy (Phaidon, $7.50), which gathers together illustrations of the Trojan myths from antiquity to the present.