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SHIPWRECK by John Fowles. Photographs by the Gibsons of Stilly. Little, Brown. $7.95. Four generations of the Gibson family have photographed dramatic shipwrecks off the Cornish coast of southwest England. They rarely lacked subjects. As Novelist John Fowles argues, this patch of ocean "may well be the most terrible ten square miles in maritime history." Some 2,000 British seamen drowned there one night in 1707; the most celebrated recent victim was the oil freighter Torrey Canyon, which was reduced to catastrophic flotsam in 1967. The Gibsons' pictures (the earliest dating from 1872) all capture the ruined beauty of such ships: "As tragic," Fowles writes, "as the vanished masterpieces of great sculptors."
ARTHUR RACKHAM; DULAC; THE ENGLISH DREAMERS; THE CHRISTMAS BOOK; TEMPTATION. Edited by David Larkin. Bantam Books. $5.95 each. With tireless research and unfailing taste, Editor David Larkin has assembled this striking series of low-priced museums without walls. Arthur Rackham and Dulac celebrate the greatest book illustrators of the Edwardian epoch. The English Dreamers displays the lush, romantic works of such pre-Raphaelites as Burne-Jones and Millais. The Christmas Book is a rich survey of Yuletide art from ancient Collier's magazine covers to the naive masterworks of Grandma Moses. Only one caveat: four of these five bargains would grace any child's library. Temptation, however, offers explicit pictures like Dali's Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity. The book must carry an unseasonal rating of R.