TRAVEL INSIDER : One Way to Beat the Cost of Flying to Spain This Summer Is by the Book : Guidebooks: There is no shortage of reading material for travelers, armchair or otherwise, interested in the bonanza of events in Barcelona, Madrid and Seville.

For a round-trip flight to Spain this year, you’ll probably pay $850 or more, and then have food and lodging to reckon with.

But thanks to this country’s publishers, you can stay home, immerse yourself in a flood of new books on Spain and spend only . . . $377.20.

That’s the combined retail price of the 22 Spain-related volumes I’ve just finished hopping, skipping and jumping through in decidedly un-Olympian form. All those books were published this year, the year of the Columbus Quincentennial, the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, the World Exposition in Seville and Madrid’s tenure as official cultural capital of the European Community.

Doubtless there are a few books I missed, but in those I scanned, the range in focus, treatment and quality was as broad as the plains of La Mancha. There are the inevitable guidebooks from the Baedeker-Birnbaum-Fielding-Fodor crowd; volumes on eating, drinking, bullfighting and retiring in Spain, and many, many pages on Barcelona--walking there, walking slowly there, walking in Picasso’s path there. So far, no books on really slow walks to cities Picasso never visited, but the year is young.

For those who may be going or those who may be reading, here’s an overview of Spain on the page:

“Baedeker’s Spain” (Prentice Hall Travel, 599 pages; $22.95) offers three principal attractions: its long-respected name, a fold-out map and an entertaining British tone. ( Tapas , for instance, are described as “titbits” of food.) But the volume’s format puts the alphabet ahead of geography, arranging sights from A to Z, and follows that section with a separate alphabetical listing of practical information. Thus, Seville’s sights are described, with a couple of maps, on pages 406-418; its hotels, meanwhile, are on page 543; its restaurants, page 589. That could make for a lot of thumbing back and forth, and the restaurant listings are thin: seven are listed in Seville (a city of about 700,000), with addresses only.

“Berlitz Travellers Guide to Spain 1992” (Berlitz Publishing Co., 756 pages; $15.95), unlike Baedeker, organizes most information by region--the more sensible strategy that most guidebooks take. Surprisingly, given the Berlitz name, this guide makes no effort to teach readers any Spanish, as other books do. That may be a shrewd decision; I’m not sure how many travelers really use their guidebooks as language primers.

“Birnbaum’s Spain 1992” (Harper Perennial, 717 pages; $17) is short on maps and long on details, citing, for instance, 16 restaurants in Seville, describing each, and including phone numbers with the addresses. Also, though the information is gathered and arranged by a large staff, the product seems to bear the personal stamp of editors Stephen Birnbaum (who died of complications of leukemia on Dec. 20, after this book had gone to press) and Alexandra Mayes Birnbaum. Valencia, for instance, is described as “a pearl that must be sought out among swine”--that is, the sprawl of modern development that surrounds the Old City.

The voice of “Discovering Spain” by Penelope Casas (Alfred A. Knopf, 591 pages; $20) is even more personal. In the introduction, the author describes falling in love with the country and her Spanish husband as a student 30 years ago. Having written two previous books about the food of Spain, Casas lingers longer on that subject than do the other guidebooks. The tone can be a bit breathless (“The beauty of Ronda!” begins one section), but Casas lists with detail many hotels and restaurants, including maps and many asides on Spanish culture and traditions. (Seville restaurant count: 14.)

“Fielding’s Spain & Portugal 1992” by A. Hoyt Hobbs and Joy Adzigian (Fielding Travel Books, 697 pages; $17) spends the vast majority of its first 500 pages on Spain, and groups its listings by region. Maps are included, and hotels and restaurants are grouped by cost. Driving directions are helpfully typeset with narrower margins than the rest of the text.

“Fodor’s 92 Spain” (Fodor’s Travel Publications, 567 pages; $16) would seem to be the map-lover’s choice--its pages are teeming with them--and is well-larded with addresses, phone numbers and directions.

Of all the special events in Spain this year, the Olympic Games seem to have gathered the most worldwide attention. Not surprisingly, Barcelona has also inspired more city-specific guidebooks than its rivals Madrid and Seville.

Like other guides by the same publisher, “Barcelona Access” by Richard Saul Wurman (Access Press, 158 pages; $17) is crafty in its presentation. It breaks the city into 10 areas, maps each of them and uses blue type for hotels, red for restaurants, green for shops and so on. Offered in the visual equivalent of sound bites, the information goes down easy. Also, Wurman’s special interest is architecture, so his guidebook’s entry on the works of Antoni Gaudi, the force behind the best-known buildings in the city, is particularly fact-packed and insightful. Among many Olympic researchers at work in Madrid for NBC Sports, I am told, this is the guidebook of choice.

“Birnbaum’s Barcelona 1992” (Harper Perennial, 210 pages; $10) is, as one might expect, a close relative of the Birnbaum Spain book, its contents whittled, reshaped and augmented with a 35-page section outlining five neighborhood walks.

In “Frommer’s Barcelona ‘92” by F. Lisa Beebe (Prentice Hall Travel, 245 pages; $12), 117 pages are devoted not to Barcelona but to the Balearic Islands of Majorca, Minorca and Ibiza. That could be viewed as a bonus, but if what you want is a close look at Barcelona, Frommer delivers half of what its heft seems to promise. In the pages that do deal with the city, the book seems thorough on phone numbers, addresses and prices.

“The Real Guide: Barcelona” by Jules Brown (Prentice Hall Travel, 363 pages; $13) includes what most guides do, but shows a broader social consciousness, including brief sections on sexual harassment (“problems are at the worst on the coast, where loads of macho Spaniards converge in search of ‘easy’ tourists”) and gay and lesbian Barcelona (it cites Sitges, a resort 25 miles outside the city, as a costly but much-favored destination).

Besides the Barcelona guides, there are at least two other city-based books.

One is “Madrid Inside Out” by Arthur Howard and Victoria Montero (Frank Books, 231 pages; $12.95), which is billed as a guide for living, working and studying in the Spanish capital. The book’s writing can be fuzzy (“Prosperity,” the authors write early on, “came at the expense of Europe’s highest rates of unemployment and drug addiction.”), but the volume is full of useful tables showing distances between cities, telephone codes, bank addresses and the like. The cultural hints seem on the mark, too, such as the warning to never call anyone a liar ( mentiroso ) because that once implied a challenge to duel and remains “an offense which has no equivalent in Anglo-Saxon culture.”

“The American Express Pocket Guide to Barcelona and Madrid” by Herbert Bailey Livesey (Prentice Hall Travel, 172 pages; $13) is a dual entry in the guidebook derby, dealing with both those cities and throwing in a section on Seville as well. It is the most compact of the city books (though its hard cover may make it uncomfortable in your pocket) and seems to run even with the rest in detail.

For those who prefer to see their cities by foot, there is the Barcelona walker’s trio.

“Barcelonawalks” by George Semler (Henry Holt & Co., 268 pages; $12.95) offers five illustrated routes through the city, including large dollops of history in its narrative format. “Slow Walks in Barcelona” by Michael Leitch (Harper Perennial, 237 pages; $13) includes 21 routes, mapped and accompanied by brief histories of locations along the way. “Walks in Picasso’s Barcelona” by Mary Ellen Jordan Haight and James J. Haight (Peregrine Smith Books, 132 pages; $12.95) includes seven routes with maps and black-and-white photos, and reaches beyond its namesake (who, after all, spent much of his time in Paris and elsewhere) to point out such sites as Joan Miro’s birthplace.

In the broad category of travel literature, at least two Spain-related volumes have reached stores since January.

Robert Hughes’ “Barcelona” (Alfred A. Knopf, 575 pages; $27.50) has won widespread attention, in part because its author is Time magazine’s art critic. Reviewing the book for The Times, Jan Morris noted scattered errors of fact, but on the whole found Hughes’ work “a scholarly cornucopia of facts, evocations, interpretations and speculations, presented with a grand enthusiasm and telling us more about the city of Barcelona that almost any of us will ever need to know.”

“The Last Serious Thing: A Season at the Bullfights” by Bruce Schoenfeld (Simon and Schuster, 238 pages; $22) examines the state of bullfighting in Spain today and follows the doings of an American (a friend of mine, so I attach no adjectives) in Seville and elsewhere.

Beyond the guidebooks and literature lie a variety of books aimed at special interests.

“Born to Shop Spain” by Suzy Gershman and Judith Thomas (Bantam Books, 255 pages; $10) is a compendium of malls, main streets and commercial neighborhoods and regional specialties (ceramics in Seville, for instance), organized into sections on Andalusia, Seville, Madrid, Toledo and Barcelona.

“Choose Spain” by John Howells and Bettie Magee (Gateway Books, 246 pages; $11.95) offers advice to those considering a leisurely vacation or a retirement in Spain or Portugal.

“The Wine Atlas of Spain” by Hubrecht Duijker (Simon and Schuster, 240 pages; $40) is a coffee-table book full of color photography and vineyard maps, and also a bid by a veteran wine writer to, in the words of the dust jacket, “put Spanish wines on the map.”

“A Season in Spain” by Ann and Larry Walker (Simon and Schuster, 458 pages; $30) is a mixture of travel writing, history and more than 100 recipes combined in a narrative that explores celebrated and uncelebrated places and personalities that figure in the world of Spanish food and wine.

“Summer Games Access” by Richard Saul Wurman (Access Press, 110 pages; $10) uses elaborate color illustrations and in-depth explanations to lay out the rules and likely leaders in the coming summer’s Olympic competitions. This is the place to learn that Simon Fairweather (Australia) is the favorite in archery; that team handball involves seven players on each side, and that a regulation badminton shuttlecock shall weigh no less than 4.74 grams, no more than 5.5. You may not be able to afford the trip to Barcelona, but you can still try to catch those NBC researchers dozing.