HOLIDAY GIFT BOOKS : A Few of My Favorite Things

People lost more than houses in the great Laguna and Malibu fires. If they escaped with their lives and animals, they are no doubt grateful. But it is no small thing to loose “everything”--especially the furnishings of your spiritual and emotional life--a journal, treasures brought home from travels, a dead nephew’s favorite toy, photographs. Material objects are sometimes a silver thread, the only link, connecting us to the most spiritual or emotional experience of our lives.

That is why, try as we must to dismiss material things, they still have such an emotional hold on us. When we loose them, they haunt us. We spent our lives searching for replacements.

But collecting things just clutters your life! It brings in more junk than you will ever need, more stuff to mourn the loss of, should fire, earthquake or burglary strike. Yet despite caveats about material excess, collectors keep on collecting.

Wines, hats, dolls, milk jugs, bears, pigs, jewelry, movie memorabilia, weather vanes, you name it, somebody is collecting it. Paying dearly too, I imagine. And of course coffee-table books appear holiday season after season that cater particularly to the mania of collectors of stuff as well.

Pauline Cockrill’s THE TEDDY BEAR ENCYCLOPEDIA (Dorling Kindersley: $34.95; 240 pp., color photography by Peter Anderson and Jim Coit, indexed), features an introduction by Paul and Rosemary Volpp, the people who forked over something like $86,000 for a Steiff named Happy at a 1989 Sotheby auction. So you can see that teddy bears mean serious business. Once collected, they require devotion, names and a clean, well-lighted place to sit and observe events. Teddies are silent, but philosophical.

It may start with one bear, but bears are like potato chips; how can you be happy with just one? Teddies, unlike their endangered, natural counterparts, are very gregarious creatures that do better in groups (prides? herds? What do you call a collection, a throng, a mass, a bunch of teddy bears?).

Cockrill’s new book is the perfect companion for “The Ultimate Teddy Book” she published with DK in 1991. Steiff, Hermann, Schuco, Chad Valley, Merrythought, Deans--all the star bear manufacturers are profiled here, as well as some obscure companies that have have come and gone, but left a paw print on the stuffed toy world.

Cockrill also fills you in on the work of contemporary bear artists (as opposed to toy manufacturers), antique bear care and repair, and a directory of places to search out and purchase collectible bears.

This is the most beautifully illustrated bear book yet.

Even the most cynical among you will find an appealing bear in these pages, one with attitude . I particularly like Mr. Whoppit, who belonged to British land and water speed-record maker Donald Campbell. The bear survived Campbell’s fatal record attempt in 1967, his kapok filling having allowed him to float to the surface of England’s Coniston Water.

THE ULTIMATE DOLL BOOK by Caroline Goodfellow, forward by Dorothy and Evelyn Jane Coleman, photography by Matthew Ward (Dorling Kindersley: $24.95, 160 pp., indexed) shares a look- alike white-and-gold jacket with the bear books and could make a nice shelf companion if you have a color scheme to your library. My own experience tells me that doll people and bear people generally don’t see eye to eye. I’m not partial to dolls myself. They remind me of a “Twilight Zone” episode I vaguely recall about a murderous, toothy doll that talked, so I’ve never been inclined to collect them, or have many around.

If you like to surround yourself with dolls, however, you will find this history of doll-making informative, full of vibrant photos. Most appealing to me was a doll called “Lady With Bru Wooden Body” circa 1870; she comes equipped with a toy Saratoga Trunk filled with gorgeous mini-replicas of items found in a 19th-Century lady’s boudoir--perfect little gowns and tiny lace-up boots, parasols, wood brushes with real bristle, pearl and jet necklaces, creme-colored stationery wrapped in silk ribbon, and tortoise-shell lorgnettes.

As Native American jewelry has become coveted by collectors all over the world, the coffee-table books on the subject have started to make their welcome appearances. Most memorable in the last couple of holiday seasons were “Beyond Tradition,” an examination of the more experimental Indian artists’ work, and Dexter Cirillo’s informative study, “Southwestern Indian Jewelry”. Newest is THE TURQUOISE TRAIL: Native American Jewelry and Culture of the Southwest, text by Carol Karasik, photographs by Jeffrey Jay Foxx (Harry N. Abrams: $49.50; 224 pp., 171 illustrations, 146 in full color).

Anybody who loves Indian jewelry will enjoy studying the spectacular, bold pieces closely, lovingly photographed here. But don’t look here for an in-depth study of the artists, sources of traditions or new directions that Indian jewelry is taking these days.

The text of what is essentially a magnificent photo book is problematic. It is a strange hybrid of elliptical history, Native American mythology and the author’s musings; there’s poetry to be found here but sometimes Karasik is too stingy with her facts.

I learned that the Rio Grande gorge may have been created, not by a glacier, but by a stampede of “supersaurs” whose shins reached two stories high! Reptiles that could walk from Taos to Santa Fe in about three steps! Anyway, facts such as these lend more mystery to the already dramatic landscape in which the pre-Columbian turquoise trade began, between the Pueblo peoples and the Aztecs, Maya and Toltec. Karasik’s renditions of myths of the natives of Mexico and the Southwest are incomprehensible to anyone who is not well informed in this complex arena of literature and religious beliefs. Take it as mysterious poetry and move on to the pictures.

You don’t to assemble a big wardrobe of hats to be a hat person. One or two great hats will do the trick. Having a signature beret or Panama lends a certain mystique to one’s profile. But it takes guts. In today’s so-called anything-goes fashion climate, wearing a hat turns heads. You bravely wear one to work, to a restaurant or party, and people say, “Cool hat!” But you know that they’re thinking, “ Weird . Trying to make some statement? “ Hats are definitely for the brazen-at-heart these days. Most everybody I know keeps theirs stacked up their closets these days.

My grandfather was a hat maker in Chicago during the Depression, furnishing fedoras, newsboy caps and homburgs to the denizens of a neighborhood controlled by Capone and his boys. Maybe that’s why I’ve always believed in the romance of hats.

Hats off to THE HAT BOOK, photographs by Rodney Smith, essays by Richard Bernstein, Mary D. Kierstead, Michael Malone, Susan Richards Shreve et al. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: $25; 128 pp.). This smart little book is a perfect stocking stuffer--or fits neatly into a small hatbox too--with evocative, understated photos that convey mystery, glamour, humor, humanity. The short, personal essays remind us of why we associate hats with social or professional status, eccentricity, style and bygone eras. “When I first put on a hat . . . I was expecting to see the glamorous silhouette of Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, private eye, or perhaps Harrison Ford in his Indiana Jones incarnation,” New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein writes. “My narcissistic striving in the purchase of a navy blue Borsalino was for a rakish elegance, modern and timeless at the same time. But in the image of my shadow, I didn’t see Bogard or Ford. I saw Morris, my grandfather.”