LESLEY DUNCAN

Round-up of

illustrated books by.

LIKE the body beautiful the book beautiful may disappoint on closer

acquaintance. However, a new clutch of illustrated books offers contents

to match good looks. Mountains and nature, art and artists, people and

their places, are the perhaps predictable themes.

Jim Crumley is a man of strong feelings. His commitment to the

Scottish hills is almost frightening in its intensity. Not for him the

dubious pleasures of Munro-bagging:

''I have no idea how many Munro and Corbett summits I have stood on

and I don't care. Turning mountains into something collectable and

clubbable has always seemed to me both bizarre and a disappointing

response in a human breast to the mountain superlative.''

That made clear, he proceeds to a personal confession in his ninth

book, Among Mountains (Mainstream, #14.99). ''There are a handful of

mountains and mountain landscapes to which I return addictively like an

unrequited lover craving favours, secrets, intimacies.''

The tackety-booted will cringe at this overt emotionalism. Fellow

spirits will understand.

Apart from the Cairngorms and Glen Coe, mountains that move him

include Ben Ledi, the Siamese twins of Ben Vorlich and Stuc a' Chroin in

Perthshire, and my favourite Cir Mhor in Arran.

But there is a sense in which Crumley's sensitivity, taking him into

formal poetry at times, is inimical to the sensitivities of others. He

deplores the tourist penetration of Ben Ledi and would have the Glen Coe

road diverted as part of a utopian vision for the glen. But he too is a

tourist, albeit of the most enlightened kind. His pictures are as moody

and majestic as his prose. Cir Mhor makes the cover.

The mountains in Ansel Adams in Color (Little, Brown, $50) are on a

grander scale. The book offers 50 images by a man who has been described

as America's greatest landscape photographer. Look at the white cliffs

of El Capitan in Yosimite National Park (from which Star Trek's Captain

Kirk once fell) or the terraces of Arizona's Grand Canyon and be humbled

by transatlantic nature -- and impressed by its recorder.

Lewis Spence -- poet, Scottish nationalist, and anthropologist -- was

fascinated by the native Americans who dwelt in these vast landscapes.

In The Illustrated Guide to North American Mythology Studio Editions

print legends collected by Spence from tribes ranging from the Iroquois

to the Pawnees. It would have been good to have Spence's comments on

these ingenuous tales of gods, men, and animals in close communion, and

to know something of the circumstances in which he gathered them.

Lacking any scholarly context, one may simply admire the illustrations

of wild creatures and exquisitive native artifacts of the kind that

graced the 1990 exhibition, Land of the Brave, at Glasgow's McLellan

Galleries. Golden eagle feathers adorn the quaintly described ''war

bonnets'' of the native chiefs.

There are eagles, sea and golden, in Blackburn's Birds, but sadly no

puddleducks, though Jemima Blackburn's bird paintings influenced Beatrix

Potter. Blackburn, a cousin of the great physicist James Clark Maxwell,

was one of those extraordinary Victorians whose talents and intrepid

spirit overturn preconceptions of nineteenth-century womanhood.

She hobnobbed with the Duke of Wellington and Ruskin, exhibited at the

Royal Academy, explored Iceland, and painted in the bazaars of Istanbul

and Cairo. A watercolour artist of stunning talent (and humour), she

used her paints as a composite diary and photographic record of family

life and her multifarious doings. Anyone who saw the exhibition

''Jemima'' at Glasgow's Collins Gallery earlier this year or has read

the book of the same name will be prepared for the enchantment of this

new collection of her bird illustrations (Canongate, #25).

Whether her subject is fluffy fledging robins or stern-beaked

predators, she brings not only anatomical acuity but an unacademic

warmth to her compositions. This may be partly explained by the fact

that she drew from life not carcasses.

Blackburn took a pet starling with her to Egypt. These gregarious

chooks also feature in The River Tay and Its People by Graham Ogilvy

(Mainstream, #14.99). ''Over one million pairs'' roost on the rail

bridge, according to maintenance supervisor Peter McPherson, whose team

have to deal with their detritus.

This genial book follows the river Tay from the sea to its head-waters

with a mixture of history and economics and interviews with fascinating

folk en route. No mention, though, of Lewis Spence's poem ''The Carse''

which tells how ''that passionate Tay / Out of my heart did flow.''

Yet more bird illustrations (this time by Rodger McPhail) complement

Colin McKelvie's A Country Naturalist's Year (Swan Hill Press, #19.95).

There is a chapter on The Leaper (alias the hare) which describes how

hundreds of the long-eared charmers migrated from Northern Ireland's old

to new airport in the 1960s, drawn by the bright lights.

Once upon a time most schoolchildren could lisp some lines from ''The

Lake Isle of Innisfree'' and might even know the author was W. B. Yeats.

Yeats's younger brother Jack is less well known on this side of the

Irish Sea. Amends are made in The Art of Jack B. Yeats by T. G.

Rosenthal (Andre Deutsch, #30 until December 31). This is an

exhilarating visual account of an artist whose work ranged from his

early bold black-and-white illustrations of Irish characters to mature

oil paintings which combine uniquely a narrative element with wild

whorls of semi-abstract colour. It's no surprise that Yeats and

Kokoschka liked and admired each other.

Yeats drew horses beautifully and an illustration to one of his own

books shows a mounted rider who is a dead ringer for Clint Eastwood's

Man with No Name.

Masterpieces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Little, Brown, #35)

contains the most ravishing images from Ancient Greece to Van Gogh by

way of the Renaissance. The best of American art competes with that of

the old world. Definitely a book to handle with respect and scrubbed

hands.

And finally two books for the strong of stomach. Robert J. Groden's

The Killing of A President (Bloomsbury, #20) offers ''the complete

photographic record of the JFK assassination, the conspiracy, and the

cover-up'' while James Herbert's Dark Places (HarperCollins, #18.99), is

for the grave and ghoulish.