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THE WORLDS OF ERNEST THOMPSON SETON. Edited by John G. Samson. 204 pages. Knopf. $25. Ernest Thompson Seton knew the true meaning of animal magnetism. For most of his 86 years, the writer-artist was uncontrollably attracted to creatures great and small. His best work, reconsidered 30 years after his death, is a reconciliation of opposites. The scientific Seton could count the feathers on a grackle (4,915); the romantic Seton attributed human characteristics to crows, wolves and rabbits. Both attitudes are fused in this scrapbook of nature notes, lush oil paintings and meticulous life studies. The volume is plainly meant as a celebration, but its illustrations carry an aura of valediction —a sense of the approaching world of endangered species.
THE LAST EMPIRE: PHOTOGRAPHY IN BRITISH INDIA, 1855-1911. Texts by Clark Worswick and Ainslie Embree. Unpaged. Aperture. $19.95. Clark Worswick, a photographer and film maker, has assembled a pictorial gallery of extraordinary technical excellence. More important, it is a voyage back to British India, and not entirely to the India of its rulers' vision. There are, to be sure, the colonial set pieces: viceregal functions, regimental assemblies, Lancers posed as if for a sixth-form Eton portrait. But dauntless British photographers penetrated the far reaches of Queen Victoria's mightiest possession to capture magnificent scenic panoramas, demented rajahs, beguiling fakirs and guileful snake charmers, palaces, pleasure domes and poverty, all with the objective innocence of a Victorian traveler sketching Venice.
THE SECRET PARIS OF THE '30s by Brassaï. Unpaged. Pantheon. $17.95. Seeking the seedy side of Paris, Brassaï photographed prostitutes, clochards, crooks, transvestites and drug addicts. If the resulting images seemed shocking in the 1930s, they retain little journalistic voltage now, in an age accustomed to grittier images of such subjects. Yet the famous Hungarian-born photographer's pictures must be valued for their composition, insight and their evocation of the romance of sin.
$12.95 AND UNDER
THE GOLDEN AGE OF STYLE by Julian Robinson. 128 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $12.95. This is a languorous history of haute couture from 1911 to 1932, when Bakst, Poiret, Vionnet, Chanel and other fashion designers found inspiration in the restless lines and superb craftsmanship of art deco. Though the text is thin and rhapsodic, the book's emphasis falls properly on the sumptuous dresses of the day as rendered by a band of Parisian illustrators. They were an expert lot—so deft, witty and evocative that today's fashions look shabby by comparison.
LADY OTTOLINE'S ALBUM. Edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. 117 pages. Knopf. $12.50. Party snapshots are usually of interest only to the guests—unless the guests are of interest to uninvited outsiders. Lady Ottoline Morrell's visitors were and still are. A bohemian daughter of the British aristocracy, she and her husband Philip began collecting literary lions during the first decade of this century. Before her death in 1938, she had entertained and photographed everyone from Henry James to Ian Fleming. As a photographer, Lady Ottoline made an excellent hostess. Yet, as collected here, her labors produced a faded, fascinating record of the flowers of Bloomsbury and environs.