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GREAT BOOKS AND BOOK COLLECTORS by Alan G. Thomas. 280 pages. Putnam. $35. An opulently illustrated, often witty guide to bibliophilia and its causes (there is no cure). Author Thomas, a London book dealer, discusses everything from early illuminated manuscripts to the feats of the best printers, bookbinders, illustrators, forgers and dupes. Happily, descriptions focus on people rather than techniques. Of J.P. Morgan, last of the profligate collectors, Thomas writes with typical piquancy: "He pursued the life of an unostentatious gentleman on a majestic scale."
IN AMERICA. Photographs and notes by Ernst Haas. 144 pages. Viking Press. $35. This is a deeply affectionate work: Haas' opening shot of Monument Valley is grand enough to have made John Ford jealous, and his impressionistic multiexposure of nighttime Manhattan should be accompanied by Rhapsody in Blue. More important, the author-photographer knows his territory well enough to make a haunting composition out of a simple line of telephone poles arcing across a bleak valley. In America might be this year's most oblique and intriguing Bicentennial book.
VOLCANO by Maurice and Katia Krafft. Introduction by Eugene Ionesco. 174 pages. Abrams. $35. Authors Maurice and Katia Krafft have spent most of their lives peering into craters reeking of sulfur smoke, standing on the edges of steaming fissures and dodging red rivers of molten lava. Now they celebrate those exotic outlets for earth's potent forces in the most beautiful—and frightening—book on volcanoes ever assembled. Here, for example, is the black cone of Surtsey rising from the sea off Iceland in 1963, the Indonesian volcano Batur shooting lava bombs skyward in 1971, Italy's Stromboli still flaring like a Roman candle, and the lava lake of Zaire's Rugarama glowing as luridly as the lower pits of hell. As Absurdist Playwright Ionesco suggests in his introduction to Volcano, all one has to do is gaze at these awesome pictures to realize that in many locales the Apocalypse is a daily event.
FLAGS: THROUGH THE AGES AND ACROSS THE WORLD by Whitney Smith. 357 pages. McGraw-Hill. $34.95. Man has been making and waving flags for more than 5,000 years and, as Emily Dickinson noted, "No true eye ever went by one steadily." She did not reckon on the scholarly zeal of Whitney Smith. His hefty book conveys an encyclopedia of vexillology (Smith's coinage for the scientific study of flags). His enthusiasm is sometimes unsettling, as if the history of the dog were being told from the point of view of its tail. Yet his sprightly lectures are packed with odd information, and the 2,800 color illustrations that flutter through them make this unquestionably the standard book on standard-bearing.