THE TV GUIDE TV BOOK: 40 Years...

THE TV GUIDE TV BOOK: 40 Years of the All-Time Greatest: Television Facts, Fads, Hits, and History by Ed Weiner and the Editors of TV Guide (HarperPerennial: $9.95; 255 pp., illustrated, paperback original). As watching TV has supplanted baseball--and pretty much everything else--as the national pastime, this upbeat compendium of trivia is a sure-fire holiday-gift choice, even for people you don’t know well. The authors have compiled lists of shows that were announced but never made (“Three Musketeers” with Henny Youngman, Phil Foster and Joey Adams, 1957), accounts of who was originally cast for various roles (Fred MacMurray was supposed to play Perry Mason; Robert Sterling, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and William Hopper were possible alternates) and a collection of hilarious quotes (“Let’s hear it for the Lord’s Prayer!”--Ed Sullivan, 1965). Vladimir Zworykin, the inventor of the first practical television camera, offers the classic understatement, “It hasn’t turned out as I expected.”