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If William Shakespeare could see the job of bookmaking that The Printing House of Leo Hart has done with his luscious poem Venus and Adonis ($15; de luxe, $75)—some critics think he preferred it to any of his plays—he would be pleased; though he might not like the Rockwell Kent drawings as well as you may.
Les Métamorphoses d'Ovide, with 30 original etchings by Picasso (Leon Pichon, I Paris; $400-$1,200) would be a brave gift from one art-loving tycoon to another. Manhattan's Marie Harriman Gallery retails it.
If you like the spidery drawings of Arthur Rackham. you can get some new ones in Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (David McKay: $5) or in Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow (McKay: $2.50).
England's famed Nonesuch Press prints Florio's translation of The Essays of Montaigne (2 vol.: $42); Random House is the U. S. agent.
Miscellaneous. A new book of poems by Robinson Jeffers is an event. In Descent To the Dead (Random House: $7.50) 16 poems "written in Ireland and Great Britain," Poet Jeffers' surf-like lines do not crash so stunningly as on his long narrative beaches; this is a book for Jeffers enthusiasts. The edition is signed by Poet Jeffers, limited to 500 copies.
If you know any big or little girl who is both energetic and dangerously good-looking. Rockwell Kent's Birthday Book (Random House: $7.50) will be appropriate; if she is something else, his fable will not fit.
Picture Books. A good companion-book to Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday (TIME. Dec. 7) is Cartoonist Rollin Kirby's Highlights (William Farquhar Payson: $4.50), a selection of Kirby's cartoons that appeared in the late New York World during the 1920s.
Of the same character as Edward Van Every's Sins of New York (TIME. Nov. 10, 1930) but less profusely illustrated, slightly better written, is Colyumist Russel Grouse's It Seems Like Yesterday (Doubleday, Doran: $5). rapid reminiscences of the 1890s, the 1900s.
The Stag at Eve (Farrar & Rinehart: $3) is a collection of funny-pictures "for grown-ups," several of which the New Yorker deemed unfit to print.