Slim volumes with special heft

Farewell to Model T

From Sea to Shining Sea

E.B. White

Little Bookroom: 40 pp., $12.95

The reckoner of quantity within me is annoyed and dismayed by “Farewell to Model T,” with its scant 40 pages, largish type widely spaced, and its price tag just south of $13.

But my interior reckoner of quality is another matter. This is one of the 20th century’s most easy-to-read writers, holding forth on two subjects close to his heart: the automobile and the road trip. The first essay, on the passage of the Model T into history, ran in the New Yorker in 1936. The second, a 10-paragraph glance back at a New York-to-Seattle drive E.B. White made at age 22, was written in 1953. White died in 1985.

Even for magazine pieces (and especially for New Yorker pieces), they are short, and even with a few old black-and-white photos thrown in, together they yield something that is like a book but slighter.

Yet the truth is that I grabbed this volume from a tall stack of review possibilities, read it immediately and savored it like a deep draft from a fresh keg. All of E.B. White’s prose is wonderful, and his words on the automobile, aged 50 or 67 years, ring with a special tenderness and sense of play -- maybe because the author (born in 1899) was about the same age as the automobile in America.

“The driver of the old Model T was a man enthroned,” he writes. “The car, with top up, stood seven feet high. The driver sat on top of the gas tank, brooding it with his own body. When he wanted gasoline, he alighted, along with everything else in the front seat; the seat was pulled off, the metal cap unscrewed, and a wooden stick thrust down to sound the liquid in the well.... Directly in front of the driver was the windshield -- high, uncompromisingly erect. Nobody talked about air resistance, and the four cylinders pushed the car through the atmosphere with a simple disregard of physical law.”

The work never shows in his sentences, and they always seem to leave the right note hanging in the air. The joy he finds in simply advancing from one town to another is a healthy thing to be reminded of. Here he is, opening the essay on the cross-country drive:

“I located America 31 years ago in a Model T Ford and planted my flag. I’ve tried a couple of times since to find it again, riding in faster cars and on better roads, but America is the sort of place that is discovered only once by any one man.”

Then, too soon, it’s all over. And we’re left again with the quantity issue. (An old White collection on my shelf includes “The Motorcar,” a witty 1958 New Yorker essay, heftier than either of these pieces though not as reverent, on the state of automotive design. Why not throw it in here as well?)

Here’s my prescription: Find a large, comfortable bookstore, locate this book within it, lean against something solid and start reading. Ten or 12 minutes later, when you’re done, you’ll be a happier reader and ready to make an informed decision on this book as a gift or keepsake. Or perhaps you’ll just stroll away with a spring in your step.

Once you’re there among the Ws, by the way, you may come across the Little Bookroom’s previous E.B. White venture, the publication of “Here Is New York,” an essay the author wrote in 1948 for now-defunct Holiday magazine.

This is another venture that’s slim (56 pages, $16.95) but compelling. Part reverie, part lament and part exultation, the essay has long been recommended by Manhattanophiles as the best sketch ever drawn of the place. But since Sept. 11, 2001, several sentences near the end -- sentences 55 years old -- resound with a prescience so eerie they bear repeating.

“The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible,” White writes. “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.”

The passage continues: “All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.”

*

Where the state meets the sea

Outdoors: California Beaches

The Best Places to Swim, Play, Eat, and Stay on the Coast

Parke Puterbaugh and Alan Bisbort

Avalon Travel: 644 pp., $19.95

This is the third edition of this book, which first appeared in 1996. Authors Parke Puterbaugh and Alan Bisbort (neither of whom lives in California) tell us upfront that they have visited every beach in the state that’s accessible by foot, car or ferry and walked into every business cited in the pages that follow. Those are comforting words, and the information that follows is not only helpful but often colorfully put.

Border Field State Park in southernmost San Diego County is “intriguing sociology but a bummer of a beach trip.” The $22 camping fees at Faria County Park in Ventura County seem steep for “a strip of sun-baked asphalt on a wave-rocked perch with no sand to stroll on.”

This is not to say the authors are pessimists. They rave over the raw beauty of Malibu and Big Sur like the rest of us. They also make a point of offering social and environmental context, peppering the text with asides on issues such as population growth, the murder rate in Long Beach, the history of surf music and the “June gloom” that often delays arrival of summer weather here.

*

Memory, majesty on Italy’s shores

Hidden Naples and the Amalfi CoastHidden Naples and

the Amalfi Coast

Massimo Listri

Rizzoli: 160 pp., $45

With their dramatic coast, their history of volcanic catastrophe and their traditions of religion, superstition, urban living (in downtown Naples) and expat splendor (on the isle of Capri), these grounds are a pungent place to paint or photograph.

This book is mostly about Massimo Listri’s photographs, with a handful of paintings strategically placed as visual bookends. Listri’s work is strong: bas-reliefs in raking light, tagged statues in storage, sunbeams spilling into a charnel house. They are also still. I couldn’t find a single living person here -- just architectural details, landscapes and atmospheric interiors like the bathing room at the Belvedere of San Leucio and its faded frescoes.

You wouldn’t consult this book to decide an itinerary in southern Italy. But once you’ve been there, you want it as a provoker of memory. There is an intriguing sense of place in these pages.

Christopher Reynolds’ book column appears twice a month.