BOOK REVIEW : English Period Pieces Are Fragile, Quaint--and Vintage Durrell : MARRYING OFF MOTHER, <i> by Gerald Durrell</i> , Arcade Publishing $18.95; 208 pages

There’s a subtle but crucial difference between a “new collection of stories” and a collection of new stories.

Exactly as the publisher promises, this book is vintage Gerald Durrell, though readers may wonder in what year the tales were laid down. These are period pieces in every sense of the word--fragile, quaint, and so musty that dust motes fly off the page.

In “Fred--Or a Touch of the Warm South,” an English lecturer arrives in Memphis, Tenn., as the house guest of a Mrs. Magnolia Dwite-Henderson, whose conversation is rendered phonetically in the syrupy dialect you only hear in amateur tryouts for “Streetcar.”

After surviving a tea attended by ladies with names considerably less hilarious than many in Burke’s Peerage, the author meets a gaga great-uncle still fighting the War Between the States. The butler, Fred, provides further comedy in a style no longer politically correct. That’s it, except for the author’s rueful admission that he cannot understand the Southern mind.

“Retirement” is more substantial. It is the chronicle of a freighter voyage from Australia to Europe made at an indeterminate point in the past identified as “those lovely far-off days.”

On this journey, the narrator is the only male passenger among the 11 elderly women visiting England for the first time. In the course of the trip, the captain dies. In such cases, the usual procedure is burial at sea, but this case is not usual. The widow wants the body brought home, which is done, but without taking the proper precautions. The result is that both the author and the reader lose their appetites, the author temporarily, the reader for a bit longer.

“Esmeralda” is about a man’s inordinate attachment to his remarkable truffle pig. Though the setting is the Perigord region of France, the mood, the cast of picturesque locals and the condescending tone are familiar; the fun is derived from the peculiarities of people who are not English. You can, however, learn quite a lot about truffle hunting from “Esmeralda.”

Several stories seem to share this antique attitude that foreigners are funny just because they’re foreign. Ludwig, in the eponymous sketch, is German and has no sense of humor. “My very limited experience with the German race had not led me toward the belief that they were overwhelmingly humorous . . . but nevertheless, I felt that somewhere there must lurk a German with a sense of humor.”

To test his theory, the writer valiantly tries and fails to teach Ludwig to recognize a joke, the attempts providing plot and dialogue.

In “The Jury,” a more complex piece, an Englishman on a Amazon voyage encounters a hermit. Once an expert executioner, this man fled Malaysia after hanging the wrong chap, because “Bloody hell, I can’t tell one heathen from another, never could.”

Disgraced and drummed out of the profession, he wound up drinking himself to death in the rain forest, but not before having some highly original nightmares. This lost soul adds some balance to the collection by being English, at least originally.

Miss Booth-Wycherly is also English, a frail old lady who appears at the Monaco casino in marvelous antique costumes, cautiously playing roulette according to a system comprehensible only to herself. She dies relatively early in the story, bequeathing her trunks of clothes to a convent. At this point, the role of lead character in “Miss Booth-Wycherly’s Clothes” is inherited by a young nun, who makes the best of it.

The title story takes place during the writer’s boyhood on the island of Corfu. Mother is a young and charming widow whose older children pester her to marry again, ostensibly for her own good but actually so they can have more personal freedom. Mother, who is not nearly as fuddled as she sounds, outwits them neatly.

“A Parrot for the Parson” takes us back to merrie England and still another madcap heroine. Think of Mrs. Malaprop in Chanel clothes. This heroine has bought a foul-mouth parrot as a gift for an unfrocked parson.

In the end, everything works out splendidly, though one of the parrot’s most risible obscenities may remain obscure to anyone born outside the sound of Bow Bells. Even colonials familiar with Cockney rhyming slang can only guess just what’s so lewd about the expression “Bristol Cities.”