People who like to give fine books as Christmas presents would do well to inspect the following at their bookstores:
Sport. Everything you could possibly want to know about the Maryland Hunt Cup, including a chart of the course, anecdotes of all the famous races, complete statistics (1894-1931), photographs of all the winners, is included in Gentleman Rider Stuart Rose's The Maryland Hunt Cup (Huntington Press: $7.50; limited edition, $25).
Yoickers may enjoy Try Back (Huntington Press: $7.50), reminiscences of 40 years' fox-hunting in England and the U. S., by A. Henry Higginson, onetime president of the Masters of Foxhounds Association of America, now Master of England's Cattistock Hunt (TIME, Dec. 29, 1930).
In lighter vein is Frederick Watson's Hunting Pie (Derrydale Press: $7.50). enthusiastically foreworded by Mrs. Thomas Hitchcock Sr., illustrated by Paul Brown.
If you want horses, horses all the way. Lida L. Fleitmann (Mrs. John Van S. Bloodgood, M. F. H.) gives them to you from primitive times to the present, in a 372-page, profusely illustrated book (The Horse in Art; William Farquhar Payson: $15).
Jumping the Horse, by Capt. Vladimir S. Littauer (Derrydale Press: $10), may help you take your fences more lightly.
Both duck-shooters and connoisseurs of etchings would like Sportsman-Artist Roland Clark's Stray Shots (Derrydale Press: $25; de luxe edition, $75), containing 13 original dry-points by the author (with frontispiece signed) and some reminiscences of shooting in the days when there was a spring season, no bag limit.
For scholarly sportsmen Derrydale Press reprints Mr. Markland's Pteryplegia: The Art of Shooting-Flying, a treatise in heroic couplets first published in 1727 ($10; de luxe edition, $30).
Reprints. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, his best-known story, is issued by Random House ($15). Printed in a sumptuous small folio on hand-made paper by San Francisco's Grabhorn Press, the book has silhouette decorations by Valenti Angelo.
Random House also offers Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, printed by Chicago's Lakeside Press, illustrated by English Woodcutter Clare Leighton ($5). If you want Artist Leighton's signature, the limited edition is $15.
French Professor Lewis Piaget-Shanks has translated Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (Fleurs du Mai); a Major Felten has illustrated the book in 16 modernistic black-&-whites (Ives Washburn: $3).
Poet Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard serves as commentary to the weirdly posterish illustrations of Artist John Vassos (Dutton: $3.75).
Cheshire House puts out Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with etchings by Bernhardt Wall ($18); Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher ($15) with a frightening frontispiece, other wood-engravings by Abner Epstein.
Woodcutter James Reid (The Life of Christ in Wood Cuts, TIME, Dec. 22, 1930) has made effectively unbiblical illustrations for the unbiblical Song of Songs (Farrar & Rinehart: $2.50).