For Mind & Eye

They are known in the trade as "gift books," and they assuredly qualify: usually big and expensive, they make handsome presents that flatter the recipient with their implied suggestion that someone cares a lot--and carry no obligation to do more than leaf through them once. But the tag is unnecessarily depreciative, for the best of the gift books can be exhilarating visual as well as literary experiences: passports to fine art the viewer might never otherwise see, inaccessible realms he might never otherwise visit. Among the best of the recent gift books:

PRECIOUS STONES AND OTHER CRYSTALS, text by Rudolf Metz. 191 pages. Viking. $25. Dr. Metz, a mineralogist, has assembled the handsomest collection of minerals, precious, semiprecious and just plain beautiful, to be found anywhere outside a museum. The 89 flaw less color plates run the gamut from gold just as prospectors sometimes find it to the canary-yellow Tiffany diamond, 128.51 carats cut into 90 facets and worth $900,000. Dr. Metz's running comment is on the textbookish side, but no matter. With such cool splendors to survey, who wants to read?

RHINOS BELONG TO EVERYBODY by Bernhard Grzimek. 207 pages. Hill & Wang. $12.50. Africa and its wildlife have admittedly been done to death in picture books, not to mention the movies. But Dr. Grzimek, who is director of the Frankfurt Zoo and widely respected as a conservationist, makes an excellent guide. His subjects do not just stand around as in most such books. They charge the photographer, get rescued from swamps; a pride of lions claw a stuffed zebra that Grzimek set up just to see what they would do. The text is informal and informative, just as a good guide talk should be.

PICASSO: WOMEN, text by Helene Parmelin. 199 pages. Editions Cercle d'Art and Harry N. Abrams, distributed by International Book Society, a division of Time Inc. $18. With the fond blessing of the master, Miss Parmelin, a Picasso student and familiar of his household, has assembled what amounts to a private exhibit: most of these 160 studies, here presented in stunning four-color plates, have not been shown before. The artist has illuminated many of them with his own comments, and has contributed the gay, gaudy "Picasso alphabet"--multicolor flourishes in chalk--that adorns Miss Parmelin's text. The period covered is 1954-63, when Picasso, working with explosive exuberance, immortalized his lovely model (and later, second wife), Jacqueline Roque, on canvas and also in sheet metal, cast iron and ceramic tile.

THE ART OF THE ROYAL BALLET by Keith Money. 272 pages. World. $12.50. For six months Author Money recorded the leaps and pirouettes of Dame Margot Fonteyn, Nureyev and the other members of Britain's Royal Ballet. His several hundred photographs and sketches, many in color, fall a bit short of technical perfection. This is more than compensated for by the zest and understanding that went into their execution; before too long, Money knew the choreography as well as the dancers. His scenes of the company in the studio, the ballerinas in practice leotards and the heavy, woolen leggings worn for warmth, have a special charm. One can quarrel, however, with Money's emphasis. His camera lingers all too often on the figure of Christopher Gable, still only a rising star in ballet's firmament, and not often enough on the established brilliance of Nureyev and Fonteyn.

IVORY HAMMER 2: THE YEAR AT SOTHEBY'S. 256 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $12.50. For art lovers who like to look at the price tags too, this book is just the ticket. The annual report of Sotheby's, Britain's venerable auction house, which has been a British institution for years, has graduated into a profusely illustrated volume worthy of deposit on any drawing-room table. Ivory Hammer 2 is the second annual report to be published in the U.S. It reprises the 1963-64 season, during which Sotheby's knocked down an unprecedented $37 million worth of art, from an 11.80-carat unset emerald ($65,800) to the bugle that blew the charge of the Light Brigade ($4,480). More than 250 illustrations, some in color, all priced in pounds and dollars, plus--for no good reason--an original short story by Wolf Mankowitz about an imaginary sale at Sotheby's, of all places.

PLEASURE OF RUINS, text by Dame Rose Macaulay. 286 pages. Thames & Hudson distributed by International Book Society, a division of Time Inc. $17.50. On none of her 30 books did the late Dame Rose Macaulay bestow more love and scholarship than on Pleasure of Ruins, her unique evocation of civilization's past. Troy, Nineveh, Tyre, Thebes, Babylon, Carthage, Persepolis, Byzantium--all the fallen cities rise again from the centuries in her memorial. In this volume, Constance Babington Smith, Dame Rose's cousin, and Canadian Artist-Photographer Roloff Beny have paid lovely tribute to those glorious ghosts. Beny's 172 photographs, twelve in color, make a perfect setting for Dame Rose's text. In these pages the wayfarer irresistibly shares the author's "intoxication, at once so heady and so devout," at "the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs."

THE EUROPE OF THE CAPITALS 1600-1700 by Giulio Carlo Argan. 222 pages. Skira. $20. THE INVENTION OF LIBERTY 1700-1789 by Jean Starobinski. 222 pages. Skira. $20. The publisher's commendable ambition is to explore and explain Western civilization through its architecture and its art. These are volumes one and two in a series, simultaneously published in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, that will ultimately number 14. The Europe of the Capitals, with text by a professor of art history at the University of Rome, traces the decline of feudal nobility in Europe and the emergence of a bourgeoisie whose greatest gift to posterity was the modern metropolis. In The Invention of Liberty, Dr. Starobinski, professor of history of ideas at the University of Geneva, examines how the art of the era expressed Western man's new sense of freedom and self-will. Each volume carries 120 reproductions, 60 in color. The texts are strictly for the serious-minded.

PRIMITIVE ARTISTS OF YUGOSLAVIA by Oto Bihalji-Merin. 200 pages. McGraw-Hill. $16.95. The impact of these native artists, most of them peasants, is almost unbearably and perhaps unwittingly sad. The skies glower. A hired man slumps by his ax, in utter fatigue or despair. In a village cafe, the dancers do not smile. An old woman nods by candlelight, her face pale as death. A gypsy wedding scene seethes with movement, but the movement is angry, and the arm of the old man in the foreground seems to be raised in menace, his mouth seems to bellow wrath. Although Bihalji-Merin, who is an art critic and historian, limits the accompanying text to purely artistic comment, the pictures themselves project an unforgettable image of a hard life in a stern and somber land.

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