GIFT BOOKS : Closer to Home

The most interesting journeys not only yield up destinations but deliver us into the feeling that we are not only worldlier but wiser. The ambition of most coffee table books--stationery approximates of travel that they are--seems to be the same, but with the order reversed. Of course they’re supposed to make us wiser, but all that money spent on four-color reproductions and Hong Kong bindings is probably wasted if we don’t come away feeling like we’ve been somewhere .

At this moment, for instance, I am feeling quite learned about and well-traveled in the American south, thanks to THE SOUTH: A TREASURY OF ART AND LITERATURE ( Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc., distributed by Macmillan Publishing Co.; $75; 368 pp. ). In words and pictures from ninety-odd writers and artists, we naturally find a fair number of the usual southern suspects in their usual neighborhoods: Mark Twain on southern habits of conversation; Margaret Mitchell on Tara, Richard Wright on his boyhood; Frederick Douglass on the slaveholder who owned and underfed him in 1832. But this survey assembles other usual suspects in unaccustomed quarters, to engaging effect. Eudora Welty wields a camera; William Faulkner gives us a pen-and-ink drawing; and in a remarkably forthright memoir passage, W.C. Handy recalls the night that he and his classically trained combo were upstaged by an unschooled band of rural bluesmen, and why he then resolved to change musical styles. (In short, for money.) Here, furthermore, is a Harry Crews recollection of possum-eating (handling the eyeballs properly is crucial), the rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd’s lyrics to “Sweet Home Alabama,” the historian Shelby Foote’s account of the world’s first submarine and how, as a failed Confederate secret weapon, it killed more Southerners than Northerners. Here also is Frederick Law Olmsted, writing early in his varied career of an evangelical church meeting. (How southern is this book’s perspective? Olmsted is identified as an author and landscape architect of properties including the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. The Olmsted project the editors neglect to cite, and the one for which he is best known north of the Mason-Dixon line, is Manhattan’s Central Park.) There are scores of color pictures, from familiar Walker Evans photos of haggard farmers to the arresting colors of Romare Bearden’s collages, but in the pages of “The South,” unlike those of so many coffee table books, the language overshadows the images. One further achievement of “The South”: Though it revels in the singular qualities of the region and its peoples, it never slips into anything resembling simple-minded nostalgia for the oppressive days before the Civil War or Civil Rights Movement.

The author and editors of MISSION ( a Marc Jaffe Book, Houghton Mifflin; $45; 240 pp. ) had similarly rocky shoals to navigate, undertaking to celebrate the architecture that arose as Catholic missionaries labored here, but wary not to understate the devastation the Europeans brought with them. Author Roger G. Kennedy (director of the National Park Service and director emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History) addresses that devastation directly and even-handedly. In fact, if the rest of his text were as directly pitched--that is, if historical references were less elliptical and fewer terms such as “swag” and “auto-da-fe” were employed without introduction--his learned musings on the missions’ development and design in Florida, the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico might go down a bit more easily. (His observations on the North African elements in supposedly Spanish mission design are intriguing, as is his critical assessment of which missions have and haven’t been restored in historically accurate fashion.) But for many prospective owners of “Mission” this is all beside the point: The book is dominated by more than 200 color photographs, an impressive variety and deployment, considering the necessarily limited visual vocabulary that principal photographer Michael Freeman and designer David Larkin had to work with. The design and photography of “Mission” are so striking and handsome that thousands of Americans may own this book for years, never read a word of the text, and nevertheless be sure they have gotten their money’s worth.

VISITING EDEN: THE PUBLIC GARDENS OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA ( Chronicle Books, $18.95; 132 pp .) and THE WINE ATLAS OF CALIFORNIA AND THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST ( Simon & Shuster; $45; 240 pp .) have a less epic scale than the labors above. But they may be more useful off the coffee table. “Visiting Eden,” photographed by Melba Levick with text by Joan Chatfield Taylor, takes readers on a tour of 21 gardens, from the University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum (where flora of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa dominate a 135-acre collection of exotica) to San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden (where landscape architect Makoto Hagiwara created a bamboo-and-bridges, azalea-and-maple wonderland for the Exposition of 1894). The photographs, richly hued, number about 150. The text is brief and (this is a compliment) not flowery. Also, each entry is followed by addressess, phone numbers, and information on prices and hours of operation. “The Wine Atlas” by Bob Thompson, is rich in detailed maps, temperature charts and color photographs, which enliven a clearly written and data-laden catalogue of winery regions. Winery profiles are augmented by advice for travelers, all the way down to specific restaurant and lodging recommendations, with addresses and phone numbers.

RAILROAD SIGNATURES ACROSS THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST ( University of Washington Press; $39.95; 360 pp. ) by Carlos A. Schwantes, profusely illustrated with black-and-white historical photographs and a handful of color railway promotional posters, looks like a volume principally for those already involved in a serious relationship with either railway history or the Pacific Northwest. But the author, a history professor at the University of Idaho, aims to deliver more, treating railroads as “engines of regional development and social change.” For instance: No meaningful time standard existed in the United States, Schwantes notes, until 1883, when several influential railroad companies, acting with neither state nor federal approval, simplified 56 regional time standards into four standard time zones.

CANYONS OF THE SOUTHWEST ( Sierra Club Books; $25; 160 pp .), with photographs and text by John Annerino, is more reverie than itinerary. Its 85 photographs are saturated by the oranges of canyon walls and the sharp blues of the desert sky, and often animated by the presence of scrambling hikers and canyon community residents from Northern Mexico to Colorado. The images reveal the photographer’s willingness to do more than a little hiking and climbing (one of Annerino’s previous books is titled “High Risk Photography” and he is clearly still engaged in the practice) and the photography inevitably stands center stage. But Annerino’s text offers an easily digested dose of history, with emphasis on explorers and adventurers and a devotee’s reverence for “the narrowest canyons on earth, the largest, the most spectacular.” The author also pays particular attention to the observations and folkways of the region’s native peoples.