Gift Books

People who like to give fine books as Christmas presents would do well to inspect the following at their bookstores:

Sport. Everything you could possibly want to know about the Maryland Hunt Cup, including a chart of the course, anecdotes of all the famous races, complete statistics (1894-1931), photographs of all the winners, is included in Gentleman Rider Stuart Rose's The Maryland Hunt Cup (Huntington Press: $7.50; limited edition, $25).

Yoickers may enjoy Try Back (Huntington Press: $7.50), reminiscences of 40 years' fox-hunting in England and the U. S., by A. Henry Higginson, onetime president of the Masters of Foxhounds Association of America, now Master of England's Cattistock Hunt (TIME, Dec. 29, 1930).

In lighter vein is Frederick Watson's Hunting Pie (Derrydale Press: $7.50). enthusiastically foreworded by Mrs. Thomas Hitchcock Sr., illustrated by Paul Brown.

If you want horses, horses all the way. Lida L. Fleitmann (Mrs. John Van S. Bloodgood, M. F. H.) gives them to you from primitive times to the present, in a 372-page, profusely illustrated book (The Horse in Art; William Farquhar Payson: $15).

Jumping the Horse, by Capt. Vladimir S. Littauer (Derrydale Press: $10), may help you take your fences more lightly.

Both duck-shooters and connoisseurs of etchings would like Sportsman-Artist Roland Clark's Stray Shots (Derrydale Press: $25; de luxe edition, $75), containing 13 original dry-points by the author (with frontispiece signed) and some reminiscences of shooting in the days when there was a spring season, no bag limit.

For scholarly sportsmen Derrydale Press reprints Mr. Markland's Pteryplegia: The Art of Shooting-Flying, a treatise in heroic couplets first published in 1727 ($10; de luxe edition, $30).

Reprints. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, his best-known story, is issued by Random House ($15). Printed in a sumptuous small folio on hand-made paper by San Francisco's Grabhorn Press, the book has silhouette decorations by Valenti Angelo.

Random House also offers Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, printed by Chicago's Lakeside Press, illustrated by English Woodcutter Clare Leighton ($5). If you want Artist Leighton's signature, the limited edition is $15.

French Professor Lewis Piaget-Shanks has translated Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (Fleurs du Mai); a Major Felten has illustrated the book in 16 modernistic black-&-whites (Ives Washburn: $3).

Poet Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard serves as commentary to the weirdly posterish illustrations of Artist John Vassos (Dutton: $3.75).

Cheshire House puts out Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with etchings by Bernhardt Wall ($18); Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher ($15) with a frightening frontispiece, other wood-engravings by Abner Epstein.

Woodcutter James Reid (The Life of Christ in Wood Cuts, TIME, Dec. 22, 1930) has made effectively unbiblical illustrations for the unbiblical Song of Songs (Farrar & Rinehart: $2.50).

If William Shakespeare could see the job of bookmaking that The Printing House of Leo Hart has done with his luscious poem Venus and Adonis ($15; de luxe, $75)--some critics think he preferred it to any of his plays--he would be pleased; though he might not like the Rockwell Kent drawings as well as you may.

Les Metamorphoses d'Ovide, with 30 original etchings by Picasso (Leon Pichon, I Paris; $400-$1,200) would be a brave gift from one art-loving tycoon to another. Manhattan's Marie Harriman Gallery retails it.

If you like the spidery drawings of Arthur Rackham. you can get some new ones in Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (David McKay: $5) or in Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow (McKay: $2.50).

England's famed Nonesuch Press prints Florio's translation of The Essays of Montaigne (2 vol.: $42); Random House is the U. S. agent.

Miscellaneous. A new book of poems by Robinson Jeffers is an event. In Descent To the Dead (Random House: $7.50) 16 poems "written in Ireland and Great Britain," Poet Jeffers' surf-like lines do not crash so stunningly as on his long narrative beaches; this is a book for Jeffers enthusiasts. The edition is signed by Poet Jeffers, limited to 500 copies.

If you know any big or little girl who is both energetic and dangerously good-looking. Rockwell Kent's Birthday Book (Random House: $7.50) will be appropriate; if she is something else, his fable will not fit.

Picture Books. A good companion-book to Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday (TIME. Dec. 7) is Cartoonist Rollin Kirby's Highlights (William Farquhar Payson: $4.50), a selection of Kirby's cartoons that appeared in the late New York World during the 1920s.

Of the same character as Edward Van Every's Sins of New York (TIME. Nov. 10, 1930) but less profusely illustrated, slightly better written, is Colyumist Russel Grouse's It Seems Like Yesterday (Doubleday, Doran: $5). rapid reminiscences of the 1890s, the 1900s.

The Stag at Eve (Farrar & Rinehart: $3) is a collection of funny-pictures "for grown-ups," several of which the New Yorker deemed unfit to print.

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