STOCKING STUFFERS

Try walking out of your favorite bookstore without one or more of those seductive small-format books cleverly parked around the cash register area. You’ll find something to match the taste of every book lover on your gift list. Come to think of it, literacy isn’t entirely necessary. If the recipient in question is litter-box trained, that might do just as well:

FRENCH FOR CATS: The Only French Your Cat Will Ever Have to Know by Henri de la Barbe / Henry Beard (Villard Books: $9.95). Si vous--et votre chat--devez voyager en France, ce petit livre est de rigueur! Vous y trouverez tout ce qu’il faut pour le confort de votre compagnon felin: comment annoncer que “Le moment est venu de changer la litiere”; les proies preferees (par exemple, “un petit oiseau? une vilaine grosse bestiole?”) . Le cadeau de choix pour le chat mondain dans votre vie. *

* (If you--and your cat--have to travel to France, do take along this little book! You will find all you need to assure the good life for your feline companion: the right way to say “It’s time to change the litter box”; preferred prey (a little bird? a big, ugly bug?). The perfect gift for that worldly cat in your life!)

FRENCH DIRT: The Story of a Garden in the South of France by Richard Goodman (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: $16.95; 203 pp.) . This beautiful little book (the bright jacket cover alone is worth the price of admission) is a dirty love story about a young American man and some lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and parsley he grows in a small plot of rented French garden. It is also the story of growing mutual respect and friendship between this same young man and his neighbors in the remote French village he elects to live in for a year. The perfect gift for the gardener, Francophile or armchair adventurer in your life.

A CHRISTMAS STORY by Richard Burton (W. W. Norton: $9.95; 41 pp.) . The actor Richard Burton once claimed that he wanted to write, not act. Yet the only writing he published during his lifetime was this thin but winning boyhood memoir about an eventful Christmas Eve in his native Welsh village. Norton asserts that this is the first time Americans will have an opportunity to read Burton’s book, but actually it was published by William Morrow in 1964 in a graceful illustrated edition. (I know. I made my father buy me this book back then, and I still have it.) This smaller, tackier version includes a sugary afterward by Sally Burton, Richard’s widow, and two murky photos of sister Cis and the actor as a child. But Burton’s telling of the story is witty and controlled; Uncle Mad Dan, ever the pundit with his arcane references and rich, rolling language, is a genuine Welsh charmer, and the narrator really does sound delightfully 8 years old.

THE STORY OF BABAR, THE LITTLE ELEPHANT by Jean de Brunhoff (Random House: $4.95; 48 pp.). This teensy red edition of the adventures of the famous French pachyderm is a sheer delight to hold in the hand. The illustrations are clean and bright, the script delicate and a pleasure to the eye. (Wear your bifocals, though.) Trouble is, it’s too adorable to get lost among the torn and marked-up books in your kid’s room, right? Hide it.

WIT: The Best Things Ever Said by Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde et al , compiled and edited by John Train (HarperCollins: $10; 63 pp.). Another splendid trifle from the author of “Most Remarkable Names.” Sadly, we live in an age where conversation seems to be a dying art. Do people chat any more? Does anyone today live in terror of the witty put-down? (Droning on about how relevant you found “Eating” or “Mind Walk” to some poor soul seated next to you at dinner is not conversation.) Here’s an antidote. Simply memorize some of Train’s tasty morsels of brilliance before your next dinner party. It will look as if you’ve been reading the greats all your life and always have a pithy comment on the tip of your tongue. “Dorothy Parker in a book review: ‘This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It is one to be thrown away with great force.’ ” Toss this one lightly into your own stocking.

FRIDA KAHLO: Torment and Triumph in Her Life and Art by Malka Drucker, introduction by Laurie Anderson (Bantam/The Barnard Biography Series: $16.50; 159 pp.). A little biography in an appealing package. Frida Kahlo is certainly hot in L.A. these days. There’s the Little Frida Cafe in West Hollywood. And my friend Judith’s dog, Frida. And the wonderful Mexican show at the County Art Museum. Plenty of clunky, important books on great Mexican artists can be found, but here’s the perfect little stocking stuffer for the art lover in your life. Complete with some color and black-and-white illustrations.

IT’S A BOY! (Or, if you will)IT’S A GIRL!, both edited by Linda Sunshine (Macmillan: $13.95 each: 95 pp.). These are really neat little books that momentarily capture “That great cathedral space which was childhood,” as Virginia Woolf put it. There’s something comfortable and just right about these photos and quotes from literature, nursery rhymes, songs and poems about babyhood and the world of small children. They’re intelligent. They leave you thinking, yearning, dreaming. Emily Dickinson: “I’m nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody, too?” (from the boy’s book). Or, Muriel Spark, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”: “One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.” Not just another slickly packaged, shlocky collection of cutesey pictures and quotes for those most vulnerable of people, new parents, who have to be doubly protected from cliches and platitudes.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN by Virginia Woolf (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Modern Classics Series: $15.95: 125 pp.). Literary women should reread Virginia Woolf’s 1929 classic every decade. Woolf magnificently illustrates how and why women are starved for time as well as space. (Has anything changed since 1929?) She creates Judith, Shakespeare’s “sister,” his equal in talent, and shows us the social and material obstacles such a woman would have encountered, making her career as a writer or actress utterly impossible. It is only by having your own source of income, and by “lunching here, dining there . . . taking books from the shelf, looking out of the window . . .” that a woman can write. (Isn’t that what the guys have been doing for 500 years?) This attractive little hardback edition is a definite stocking stuffer for the woman whose paperback copy is so dog-eared and worn-out she can’t will it to her baby daughter.

GARDEN CLIPPINGS: A Literary Bouquet, packaged by Smallwood & Stewart (Andrews & McMeel: $15; 95 pp.). It is odd that such a charming little book of garden photos and quotes should be “packaged” rather than edited, selected, collected or compiled. But the “packaged” part aside, the likable quotes and passages about gardens and gardening come from Milton, Goethe, Claude Monet, Lord Byron, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton and a few people I’ve never heard of. (Where is Katharine White? Why is Vita Sackville-West only quoted on the jacket?) The book is stronger in the visuals department. The photographs evoke a variety of green and flowery places, from the earthy seductiveness of an Italian garden in summer to the chilly beauty of a Japanese garden in spring to a cozy, cluttered English garden at summer’s end.