ONE Christmas season, before long, some inventive publisher will simply order up a six-foot-long slab of a book and put legs on it. That will solve the problem of what to do with coffee-table volumes. They are just as massive as ever this year, and a little more expensive. Still, the shopper who cannot content himself with giving just a good novel, biography or history (heretical thought!) will find an imposing selection of Christmas books that are as satisfying to read as they are to look through. Among the best:
$20 to $35
AUGUSTE RODIN by Robert Descharnes and Jean-Francois Chabrun. 277 pages. Viking. $35.
With each passing year, Rodin emerges more clearly as the most profound, most expressively varied sculptor since Michelangelo, and here is a book that demonstrates why. In one superb photograph after another, the reader can trace the astonishing career of an artist who, though basically in the great classic tradition of Western sculpture, broke through formal bonds all his life. The text, an admirably incisive critique, enhances this tribute to Rodin on the 50th anniversary of his death.
THE AGE OF THE GRAND TOUR with introduction by Anthony Burgess and Francis Haskell. 138 pages. Crown. $30.
For size, sumptuosity, style and snob appeal, this resplendent volume wins any 1967 publisher's award for conspicuous taste. Suggested prize: a gold-trimmed watch-fob—cigar-cutter holder in champagne-tanned platypus pouch. Avoiding today's exhaustive and exhausting travel writing, this volume combines 18th century illustrations with prose from the past. The travelers' tales date from the period when English was at its best and travel did not exclude wonder, awe, respect—and suspicion. "The first thing an Englishman does on going abroad is to find fault with what is French, because it is not English," says William Hazlitt. On the other hand, in his splendidly evocative preface, the very contemporary prose stylist Anthony Burgess asserts: "In the most enlightened phases of Northern history, no man could be considered cultivated if he had not gone out to engage the art, philosophy and manners of the Latin countries." Housebound in their in creasingly tight little island, the English, with a curtailed foreign-travel allowance, could afford perhaps the book, but hardly the travel.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF TOYS by Jac Remise and Jean Fondin. 252 pages. Ed/fa Lausanne. $27.50.
Proof again that toys are designed by adults for one another as often as for children. One can easily understand why in this elegant, color-illustrated survey of a key period in the toy industry's history, 1860-1914, when the Industrial Revolution brought new techniques to toymaking. Machines could now roll metal into thin sheets, punch out forms, and fold them into the shape of toys that could be sold in greater numbers and at cheaper prices; inner works, such as clockwork miniatures, gave charm and humor to acrobat cyclists, gardeners with watering cans, mothers with prams, even mechanical accordionists who swayed as they played.
THE GREAT GARDENS OF BRITAIN by Peter Coats. 287 pages. Pufnam. $25.