Book publishers understandably tend to save their richest and most expensive books for the Christmas season. Color reproduction improves yearly, and there are few places any more where the roving camera is denied entrance. The result is an avalanche of big books, bedazzling to the eye and bewildering to the judgment of the hurried shopper. Herewith a guide to the best among them:
GUNS by Dudley Pope. 254 pages. Delacorte. $20. The first known cannon, which resembled a funeral urn, barked some six centuries ago. Mankind has since improved the methods of mass destruction with an ingenuity that becomes distressingly evident in these pages. As early as 1453, the Turks lobbed 800-lb. shells at the walls of Constantinople. The revolver, the rifled barrel and the machine gun all date from the 17th century or earlier. By the early 1800s there were carved pistols that fired around corners and a cannonball that burst just beyond the muzzle into honed sword blades—a rude forerunner of the grenade. Dudley Pope, a naval historian and author of several books, has drafted a text of deadly fascination, set off by 350 illustrations that begin with the invention of gunpowder and end with the armaments of World War II.
LENINGRAD by Nigel Gosling. 252 pages. Dutton. $25. Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg, lies on the bleak landscape of Communist Russia like an ornate brooch, a city unexpectedly and astonishingly brilliant with its canals and palaces and blue-and-white cathedrals and marble statues and gilded domes glinting in the wintry sun. Author Gosling, art critic of London's Observer, and Photographer Colin Jones have successfully limned the luminous city built by that savage giant, Peter the Great (1672-1725), along the soggy shores of the Neva. It became the seat of the czars and of Russian culture; Pushkin,
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov all gathered there. Today, as Photographer Jones's camera reveals, Leningrad's drab citizens move through Leningrad's loveliness like trespassers.
EVEREST: THE WEST RIDGE by Thomas F. Hornbein. 198 pages. Sierra Club. $25. The sheer sight of Mount Everest, its 29,028-ft. summit supporting the roof of the world, strikes awe in the hearts of mountaineers and non-mountaineers alike. It is a pity that this otherwise magnificent full-color photographic record of the 1963 U.S. expedition includes only one full portrait of the mountain, and that a distant one. The book also could have supplied a map tracing the Americans' course, as well as the routes of the two other successful climbs, the first being the British expedition of 1953. Even so, these 90 color plates rank among the best ever taken of any climb. Dr. Hornbein, a member of the expedition, wrote the text from his diary and from tapes recorded on Everest's vertiginous flanks.
FASHION by Mila Contini. 321 pages. Odyssey. $12.95. After studying haute couture from the Pharaohs forward, Signora Contini, an Italian journalist, concludes that women dress that way to entice men. Her verdict is scarcely as edifying as the 550 illustrations, which show that nearly every current style has ancient ancestry. Nefertiti's pleated tunic would draw envious stares at a Met opening night. Roman women carried collapsible umbrellas. In 18th century France coiffures soared higher than they do in today's discotheques.