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.
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