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Young Designs in Living by Barbara Plumb. 159 pages. Viking. $14.95. A fascinating social document, full of cheerful ideas about interior design. The book shows how today's "with it" people live in Europe and the U.S. They subdivide interior space into tricky levels. They love mirrors and blazing primary colors. Their art works are random—a bolt of Persian cloth, a chrome lamp, a billboard fragment, a lute. Does all this glitter mean anything more than an egotist's smile? Author Barbara Plumb, editor of the Home section of the New York Times Magazine, chats tersely about each dwelling, but wisely leaves conclusions to the reader.
Streets for People, A primer for Americans by Bernard Rudofsky. Illustrated. 351 pages. Doubleday. $14.95. A U.S. architect, engineer and enraged gadfly, Rudofsky thinks American city streets are now and always have been ugly, dirty and unfit for human habitation; and he offers fascinating pictures, mainly from Europe, to show how things could be improved. Rudofsky's pet hates: noise, cars, haste, uniformity, ugliness, greed and his fellow countrymen's habit of suggesting that criticism is unpatriotic. What he wants more of and thinks feasible are steps, arcades, automobile-free streets, covered sidewalks, plazas suitable for strolling.
Beeton's Book of Household Management —First Facsimile Edition, by Isabella Bee-ton. 1,112 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $12.95. An engrossing compendium of cookery, psychology, etiquette, management, legal, medical, moral and drainage information, which first appeared in England in 1861 and is still history's bestselling cookbook. "Men are now so well served out of doors—at their clubs, well-ordered taverns and dining-houses," the author points out, "that in order to compete ..." Any bride can finish the sentence. Mrs. Beeton, however, makes the role of bride only slightly less awesome than handling flight patterns at Kennedy airport.
The Grand Tour by Christopher Hibbert. 256 pages. Putnam. $12.95. "If a young man is wild and must run after women and bad company," Dr. Johnson once observed, "it is better he should do so abroad." But whether in search of pleasure, polish, or the splendors of Palladian architecture, young Englishmen, usually with tutors, infested Europe for three centuries. With well-chosen pictures and pungent quotations from travelers (including Diarist John Evelyn, Tobias Smollett and Edward Gibbon), this book gives a remarkably funny and extremely revealing country-by-coun-try account of Albion's impact upon the Continent—and incontinent.
Under $12.95
The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. 370 pages. Chelsea House. $12.50. Although the camping season ended some years ago when Susan Sontag explained it all, these selections from the comic-strip adventures of Buck and Wilma, "the blue-eyed, golden-haired, high-spirited young soldier-girl," are better late than never. Killer Kane, the Red Mongols, sexy space gear, baroque weaponry and quaint racial slurs—it's all here, from Buck's awakening after 500 years of suspended animation to his inconclusive battle with the Atomites.