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Where can one find the Hope dia mond, Sitting Bull's rifle, an assemblage of Cuban tree snails, a slice of a one-ton meteorite that fell on Kansas, and the skull of a fearsome, fortunately extinct creature with the deceptive name of Smilodon? All these things, and a good deal more, can be found in two places. One is the National Museum of Natural History, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution, which serves as the country's attic. The other is the book The National Museum of Natural History by Philip Kopper (Abrams; 496 pages; $60). Heavy enough to test the structural integrity of coffee tables and augmented with photographs by Kjell Sandved and Chip Clark, the book does not purport to be a complete catalogue of the museum's enormous collection. But whether it displays a 160 million-year-old fossil or a reconstruction completed only months ago, this museum without walls is second only to the actual galleries.
Camouflaged in Anna Pavlova by Keith Money (Knopf; 425 pages; $55) is an important piece of cultural research. Author-Photographer Money spent six years documenting the career of the legendary Pavlova, especially her early years in St. Petersburg, a study that somehow had never been undertaken before. Pavlova (1881-1931) symbolized dance and the mystique of the ballerina as no one else has, and her obsessive touring (20,000 railroad miles in one typical month) brought to millions their first indelible impression of ballet. Pavlova was virtually the creation of Russian Choreographer Marius Petipa, who saw beyond her early technical insecurities to her ethereal lightness and laser-like theatrical instinct. Pavlova recognized early what a powerful ally the camera could be. More than the stiffish text, the hundreds of pictures disclose her allure, the poetry of her body and even the evangelical frenzy that sent her forth to conquer the world's stages.
The work of nearly 50 photographers is on display in Washington, D.C. (Abrams; 223 pages; $50). The results, 136 full-color plates, with text by Bill Harris, range from the familiar to the obscure. The major monuments are here, of course, caught at various seasons and times of day. There is even a shot of the periodic housekeeping at the Lincoln Memorial, with a workman hosing down the Great Emancipator's marble brow. Other pictures venture beyond tourists' beaten paths: the 16-acre garden at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown; the interior of the Old Pension Building, which features the tallest (80 ft.) Corinthian columns ever built. Such information is not always easy to find in this package; captions huddle together to make room for series of full-page photographs. Persistence, though, rewards both the eye and the curiosity. The nation's capital has never looked so colorful.