GOOD THINGS ALSO COME IN BIG packages. A timely example is the venerable art book, a Christmas delight for the MTVer as well as those who still think a VCR is some sort of honor bestowed by Queen Elizabeth. Bless the old darlings and the authors, photographers and publishers who stubbornly ignore the electronic onslaught to labor with inspiration and care to bring us the treasures of the world's museums, the pleasures of distant lands and the handiwork of dreamers. Here are some of this season's finest:
AMERICANA
1. THE LAST STEAM RAILROAD IN AMERICA Photographs by O. Winston Link; text by Thomas H. Garver (Abrams; $49.50). If you were in the driver's seat, it was the embodiment of Manifest Destiny. If you were in its way, as were the tribes of the Great Plains, it was the iron horse, snorting emissary of the unstoppable paleface invasion. Today the sooty beast is the stuff of nostalgia. This is a book of homage to those vanished symbols of expansion and industrial might. The evocative old images recall a time when belching smoke and slashing rail lines were signs of progress, not pollution.
2. FOLK ART IN AMERICAN LIFE By Robert Bishop and Jacqueline M. Atkins (Viking Studio Books; $29.95). Like jazz, folk art resists the advances of formal criticism. So it is a relief to hear the authors conclude their scholarly preface with the statement, "Let the objects themselves speak to the intellect, to the senses, to the spirit." That is precisely what they do in this survey of down-home paintings, needlecraft, carvings and sculpture, like Clark Coe's wood-and-metal Man on a Hog. Most ambitious of all are the free-spirited constructions like James Hampton's altar assembled from garage-sale recyclings covered in silver and gold foil.
3. THE SMITHSONIAN By James Conaway (Knopf; $60). This handsome volume commemorates the Smithsonian Institution's 150th anniversary. Ironically, the Smithsonian was founded with a financial gift from an Englishman who never set foot in the States. James Smithson was a noted mineralogist who, stung by the Royal Society's refusal to publish his scientific papers, bequeathed the U.S. government £100,000 to build "an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge." Today its trove ranges from the Wright brothers' airplane to a prototype of the Apple personal computer.
4. THE DISNEY THAT NEVER WAS By Charles Solomon (Hyperion; $40). As productive as the studio was during Walt Disney's life (he died in 1966), many projects dear to his heart never made it to the screen. This book is a reverie on an art form whose possibilities were still being explored. The stars are not the fabled animators but the conceptual artists whose work they drew on. Here is Mickey way back when he was a rodent outlaw; drenching pastels of fairyland by Sylvia Holland; a surreal grand piano with a fierce trail of tyrannical music hovering above it--by an unknown artist. These pictures really move.
ART AND DESIGN