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The Avant-garde in Painting by Germain Bazin. 323 pages. Simon & Schuster. $29.95. Chief curator of the Louvre and author of the cross-culture survey The Loom of Art, Bazin examines the innovations of the masters and minor artists, from Giotto to Warhol, who were the revolutionaries of their day. If the book were priced at $30, the reproductions would be well worth the extra nickel.
$12.95 to $25
The Baseball Encyclopedia, 2,337 pages. Macmillan. $25. From the dawn of baseball up through the 1968 season, everything anyone could want for dominating the hot-stove league (Dick Radatz was history's best-hitting relief pitcher) or summoning up satisfying memories of heroic pinch hits and homers past.
Discoverers of Space: A Pictorial Narration by Erich Lessing. Preface by Archibald MacLeish. 172 pages. Herder & Herder. $22.50. Though the illustrated biographies of such pioneers as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Newton and Einstein run heavily to rich photographs of Renaissance studies decked out with astrolabes and telescopes, the book is remarkably imaginative, handsome and informative in conveying the evolution of man's conceptions of space.
Victorian Painters by Jeremy Macs. 257 pages. Putnam. $22.50. A Malayan-born English art dealer deals handsomely with a tribe of craftsmen-illustrators and artists who were not too proud to learn from the new art of photography, but who found too late that for mere illustration, the camera was a better box of tricks. The familiar horrors are here, from Landseer's Monarch of the Glen, looking so human that the laird who shot him should have given himself up for murder, to Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England, a soap opera about emigration.
American Manners & Morals by Mary Cable and the Editors of American Heritage. 399 pages. American Heritage. Boxed edition, $20. Accurately subtitled A Picture History of How We Behaved and Misbehaved, this sprightly book peeks at nudity, temperance, Victorian marriage (the death of an unmarried man went unwept), polygamy, camp meetings and ring-tailed roarers. Sample picture: "Stereopticon scene of wild abandon."
The Decorative Twenties by Martin Battersby. 213 pages. Walker. $20. The Twenties were not only roaring but highly decorative. Art Nouveau was replaced by art deco, followed by the geometrical, streamlined "new modernism." This comprehensive account deals with such things as posters, bookbinding, furniture, glass, jewelry and fashions.
Gardens of War, Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age by Robert Gardner and Karl G. Heider. Introduction by Margaret Mead. 184 pages. Random House. $15. Photographs taken by anthropologists are customarily of Box Brownie quality. This book, by two Harvard-trained anthropologists, offers dramatic exceptions, however. The delicately balanced primitive world they show belongs to the Dani tribe, an enclave of Stone Age warriors in central New Guinea. The pictures are beautiful and informative, especially in explaining war, which the tribe still practices as a ritual necessity, carefully limiting its deadliness.