Paperbacks make especially good gifts during a...

Paperbacks make especially good gifts during a recession: They’re inexpensive and light to carry. The latter point was especially important to Santa Claus. Times weren’t any too good at the North Pole: He’d been forced to lay off Donner and Blitzen and was concerned about the lift factor on the sleigh. He had lumps of coal for everyone who’d been naughty, but he headed for the paperback department of the local bookstore to see what was available for those who’d been nice.

The exceptional reproductions of Renaissance frescos, paintings and stained glass windows highlight three new entries in The Library of the Great Masters series from Scala/Riverside: Masaccio by Ornella Casazza; Leonardo da Vinci by Bruno Santi; Paolo Uccello, Domenico Veneziano and Andrea del Castagno by Annarita Paolieri ($12.99 each). Santi’s concise text in the volume devoted to Leonardo ranks as the most readable, but any of these lovely books would make an elegant gift.

Gary Schwartz’s highly praised biography, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (Penguin: $29.95) ranks among the most attractive art books of recent years. Though scholarly, the text is readily approachable to the general reader, and the dozens of plates capture the subtleties of the artist’s extraordinary oeuvre.

The dramatically innovative and astoundingly modern-looking drawings for costumes and three-dimensional sets in Theatre in Revolution: Russian Avant-Garde Stage Design 1913-1935 by Nancy Van Norman Baer (Thames & Hudson: $24.95) should delight and inspire any illustrators, graphic artists or theater lovers on the holiday gift list. Exter, Malevich, Rodchenko and Stepanova are among the artists who contributed to this revolution in the visual and performing arts.

To mark the centenary of the artist/writer’s birth, Coast Publishing has issued Henry Miller: The Paintings: A Centennial Retrospective ($25). The nearly 100 water colors and seriagraphs span five decades of Miller’s output.

Two new books devoted to an earlier period of art history will appeal to gift-givers with more traditional tastes. Chartres Cathedral, text by Malcolm Miller, photographs by Sonia Halliday & Laura Lushington (Riverside: $14.95) takes the reader step-by-step through the history and iconography of the exquisite stained glass windows that constitute one of the most glorious legacies of medieval art. Many of the details revealed in the book would be invisible to tourists visiting the lofty cathedral unless they brought binoculars. Readers curious to know more about one of the most pervasive myths of the Middle Ages (and a continuing inspiration for artists as diverse as Richard Wagner and Stephen Spielberg) will enjoy John Matthews’ The Grail: Quest for the Eternal (Thames & Hudson: $14.95), which explains many of the tales surrounding the legendary cup that Christ used at the Last Supper.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, The Ultimate Maze Book by David Anson Russo (Fireside: $19.95) wins the annual Silliest Art Book Award. The mandala-like mazes are so dizzyingly intricate that only a person with weeks of free time could attempt to solve them: An ideal gift for someone locked in solitary confinement.

Three notable photography books focus on the beauties of three very different lands. Sergei Eisenstein spent about 14 months in Mexico, from December, 1930, to February, 1932, working on “Que Viva Mexico!” Author Upton Sinclair withdrew his financial backing when the director spent more than $53,000 and worked for 13 months, rather than agreed-upon $25,000 and four months. (Pieces of the film were later sold to various studios and re-edited.) Mexico According to Eisenstein by Inga Karetnikova in collaboration with Leon Steinmetz (University of New Mexico Press: $20) documents the great film maker’s lost work with notes, sketches and stills. These eerie images of life and death are sure to delight film buffs.

Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott celebrate the awesome beauty of the Canadian prairie in their striking volume In a Sea of Wind (Camden House: $22.95). The photo-journalists pair their vibrant color photographs with the words of people they interviewed--farmers, cowboys, Amerindians, homemakers, concluding, “The only constant was the bond between the people and their land, and they carried it gladly, as if those ties did not restrain, but nourished them.”

A reprint of the limited-edition hardcover published in 1985, Eliot Porter’s Southwest (Henry Holt: $29.95) is the artist’s only collection of black-and-white photographs. These dramatic, sensual images capture both the macro- and microcosmic: Porter devotes equal attention to the intricate patterns formed by dried, cracking mud and to the jagged majesty of the Arizona mountains. A striking complement to Porter’s landscapes can be found in the long out-of-print Walk in Beauty: The Navajo and Their Blankets by Anthony Berlant and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg (Gibbs Smith: $29.95). The bold, colorful, abstract designs in these 19th-Century weavings reflect the delight expressed in the opening of the Navajo “Night Song:” “In beauty, happily, I walk.”

As he lives directly under an Arctic ozone hole, Santa is very concerned about ecology (the lumps of coal for those who’ve been naughty are low-sulfur). Two exceptional books of photographs taken from outer space emphasize the beauty--and fragility--of the Earth.

Issued in conjunction with the popular IMAX film, The Blue Planet by Lydia Dotto (Abrams: $19.95) is an outsized (16”x11”) volume, filled with stunning images of land and sea taken from the Space Shuttle--and depressing ones taken at ground level of burning rain forests and polluted cityscapes. The pictures in The Home Planet, conceived and edited by Kevin W. Kelley (Addison-Wesley: $22.95), are, if anything, even more spectacular. Each photograph is juxtaposed with a quotation from an astronaut. A comment by Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Artyukhin sums up the tone of this dazzling book: “It isn’t important in which sea or lake you observe a slick of pollution, or in the forests of which country a fire breaks out, or on which continent a hurricane arises. You are standing guard over the whole of our Earth.”

The natural features and artificial divisions of the planet are delineated with exceptional clarity in the Hammond Citation World Atlas (Hammond: $22.95). A map showing the ethno-political regions of what was once Yugoslavia helps the reader understand recent events in that troubled region. Although sufficiently up-to-date to include the reunified Germany, this Atlas still lists Myanmar as Burma. (Publishing world maps must be a frustrating business these days.)

After contemplating the current ecological, political and economic state of the world, Santa felt a bit of comic relief was in order. Even in good times, cartoon anthologies make excellent gifts, and the laughs seem doubly welcome in hard times.

Two of America’s most popular and influential cartoonists poke fun at Operation Desert Storm in new collections. Uncle Duke demonstrates his perennial willingness to sacrifice moral principles to make a buck in Welcome to Club Scud!, a new “Doonesbury” book by Garry Trudeau (Andrews & McMeel: $6.95). Trudeau thrives on controversy, and these irreverent cartoons earned the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist two Certificates of Achievement from Army brigades--and a condemnation from a spokesman at Langley Air Force Base.

The identical twins/lovers, Akbar and Jeff, don gas masks but keep their fezes in How to Go to Hell (HarperPerennial: $8), Matt Groening’s latest collection of “Life in Hell.” Groening’s satirical look at contemporary American life features a list of over-used terms that are forbidden for the 1990s, including dweeb, tofutti, underwhelm and lite anything. Fans of television’s most popular under-acheivers will enjoy Groening’s The Simpsons Uncensored Family Album, a collection of bizarre memorabilia that traces the clan back to their bug-eyed ancestors, Sven Simpson, Claretta Ethridge, Mary Frowning Cloud and Joe Puffing Goat.

Gary Larson envisions a future in which Darwinian selection has made cows the dominant species on Earth in Unnatural Selections (Andrews & McMeel: $7.95), a very funny collection of “The Far Side.” No other cartoonist would draw a caveman showing off his “Swiss Army Rock.” In Scientific Progress Goes “Boink” (Andrews & McMeel: $7.95), Bill Watterson demonstrates the combination of fine drawing and verbal imagination that has made “Calvin & Hobbes” one of the most popular strips in the country. It’s difficult to imagine anyone not laughing over Calvin’s misadventures as Spaceman Spiff or detective Tracer Bullet. Women who feel Cathy Guisewite’s graphically inept “Cathy” “tells it like it is” will probably be entertained by her reminiscences in Fifteenth Anniversary Reflections (Andrews & McMeel: $12.95); most men probably won’t.

Pausing near the door to pick up copies of Robert Fulgham’s books for folks who’d been ineffectual, rather than naughty or nice, Santa offered his traditional holiday parting, “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good read!”