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Henry VIII and His Court by Neville Williams. 271 pages. Macmillan. $12.95. The fascination stems not from all those spouses but from all the fact and trivia about life—and death—in a 16th century royal court. We find Henry on a peacetime visit to France accompanied by a retinue of 4,000. His infant son was a breast-fed baby whose household at birth included a carver, a baker and a cellarman. Statesmen, churchmen, mistresses, artists—heads roll by until the reader feels as much in the domain of fiction as history. The many illustrations, including noble portraits by Holbein, only enhance the impression.
Van Gogh's "Diary." Edited by Jan Hulsker. 168 pages. Morrow. $12.50. A happy marriage of Van Gogh's letters and art, arranged chronologically so that the artist's sparse, honest words become an eloquent, often moving commentary on his highly charged work. Even as madness isolates him. Van Gogh remains totally in control of both his media. The reproductions are excellent.
Under$10
Guerrilla Television by Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corp. Illustrated. 108 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $7.95. In Shamberg's "information economy," people will live with their own home video cameras "feeding themselves back to themselves to develop a sense of video self and video grammar, and meanwhile building up a personal and public access video data bank." Good luck. Yet above this book's McLuhanoid jargon and bughouse semantics, one challenging notion shimmers: the hope that the power of commercial television can be decentralized.
Romanesque Art by George Zar-necki. 196 pages. Universe Books. $6.95. The author's first paragraph—typical of the text—is a veritable tympanum of qualification about the very existence of a "Romanesque period," which suggests to the reader that he is about to embark on a speculation about life on Venus rather than a discussion of one of Western civilization's great artistic realities. Happily, the black and white photographs warm up the 900 year-old stones they portray, and the 45 color plates are subtle and ungarish. Despite some faults (only one photo of Vezelay and no map of anything), it is a genuine art book bargain that brings alive a time when Europeans, recovering from the Dark Ages, began to build austere ehufohes and decorate them with frenzies of sculpture.
Notes in Hand by Claes Oldenburg. Unpaged. Dutton. $6.95. Proof that good things still come in small packages, this 61n. by 4¼ in. book presents 50 of Pop Sculptor Oldenburg's sketches reduced to one quarter of their original size, but with no diminution in wit or imagination. Who else can turn a pie into a typewriter before your eyes, or a pork chop into a brassiere?
Touch the Earth: A Self Portrait of Indian Existence. Compiled by T.C. McLuhan. 185 pages. Outerbridge & Dienstfrey. $6.95. Marshall McLuhan's daughter has opened a small inverted generation gap by matching sepia-tone photos of American Indians with their old fashioned linear laments about the Great Spirit's land going under the plow.