* Heavy Reading: “The Sistine Chapel” is...

* Heavy Reading: “The Sistine Chapel” is a coffee-table book for really big coffee tables--although some owners may want to keep it in a safe. The tome on the restored Sistine Chapel ceiling is on sale for $1,000--the most expensive general trade book ever. Knopf has printed 2,500 copies, stuffed with color photographs of Michelangelo’s frescoes with their centuries of grime and varnish removed. The book is 17 inches high and weighs in at 30 pounds.

* The Word: One day after Jimmy Swaggart was said to be stepping down from the pulpit after his second scandal involving a prostitute, God, he said, called him back. “He said: ‘You tell them . . . you’ll be making television programs,’ ” Swaggart said Wednesday from his Baton Rouge, La., pulpit. Swaggart also seems to have received a message from on high for his congregation: “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”

* Fancy Footwork: When Fred Lebow, father of the New York City Marathon, visited President George Bush at the White House earlier this year, he turned heads by wearing running shoes with his business suit. “I didn’t have any dress shoes,” Lebow says in Sunday’s Parade magazine, and he didn’t want to buy a new pair. Bush greatly admired the sneakers, so Lebow persuaded the manufacturer to send him a pair.

* Outhouses Are Out: You can admire them for their historic value, but as of this week the village council says it’s illegal to use or build a working outhouse in Morristown, Ohio. The council said while the town, pop. 400, is struggling to build a sewage system, the old-fashioned structures should not proliferate. But the working outhouse near Town Hall will stay--for its historical value.