SEASON’S READINGS : Picture books for dreamers and pranksters, dog fanciers and art lovers

No one can see memory, of course, but if we could, I suspect it would appear to be as magical and mesmerizing as the images of Prague which Czech-born author-illustrator Peter Sis has created for The Three Golden Keys. Designed to show his New York-born daughter “where her father came from,” Sis says, the book tells the richly imagined and dreamlike story of a man--Sis himself, presumably--whose hot air balloon is blown off course and lands in the Prague of his distant childhood.

Rushing through the empty, serpentine streets, the man arrives at his boyhood home to find the door secured by three rusty padlocks. A black cat--perhaps his childhood pet--appears and, with magical, shining eyes, guides him to three favorite places from his childhood. In each place he meets a strange person: a librarian made of books, in the manner of the 16th-Century artist Arcimboldo; an emperor composed of plants, and a mechanical man. Each of them gives him a gold key and a scroll containing a local legend. Armed with these literal and symbolic keys, the man returns to his house, unlocks the door, and finds the shadowy figures of his parents: He has come home, a boy again.

Each of the elaborate pen-and-ink drawings, executed on paper stained to resemble colors, is contained in a gold frame, a device which suggests that reading the book is like strolling through a wonderful museum of memory. As the man in the book continues his quest, Sis plays with perspective and fills his pictures with the kind of symbolic images that haunt our dreams. An aerial view of the city shows that the streets form the shape of a cat; the zodiac fills the sky like a sun which circles the seasons round; faces appear in windows of deserted-looking buildings like ghosts--or like memories of the day when Sis said “good-bye to this forever.” The late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who edited this book shortly before her death, called Sis “a genius.” Few who sees this book will disagree.

Celebrated New Yorker cartoonist James Stevenson shows us another way memory looks in this fifth autobiographical picture book Fun No Fun (Greenwillow: $14). For him it is all softly impressionistic but evocative watercolor scenes of events charmingly blurred by the passage of time. With his signature wit, Stevenson recalls things from his boyhood which were FUN . . . and some which weren’t. Examples: fun was cowboy boots. No fun was galoshes. Fun was “my birthday.” No fun was “my brother’s birthday.” More than a simple list of things, though, “Fun No Fun” is an inventory of childhood; its individual particulars transformed by unassuming art into an experience that is universal.

One of America’s greatest poets, Donald Hall, shares a memory not of his own but of his ninety-year-old mother’s long-ago childhood in Lucy’s Christmas (Browndeer Press/Harcourt, Brace: $14.95). Michael McCurdy has recreated the rural, turn-of-the-century world of New Hampshire in his amazingly apposite, color scratchboard illustrations.

Hall, whose recent recommitment to the picture book is a blessing to the form, has also written I Am the Dog, I Am the Cat (Dial: $15.99), hilarious poems for the contrapuntal and very opinionated voices of American’s favorite pets. Designer and illustrator Barry Moser has provided watercolor pictures which invest them with individuality and engaging personality.

Moser’s rotweiler Rosie served as the canine model for Hall’s book and makes an encore appearance in Moser’s own book My Dog Rosie (Blue Sky/Scholastic: $13.95). Sharing the spotlight with the rotweiler is the artists’s three-year-old granddaughter, Isabelle Harper, who tells us about her day with Rosie. Since this is her story, her doting (and brilliantly gifted) artist grandfather gives her co-authorial credit!

If this has been a good year for granddaughters, it’s been a great picture book year for dogs. They’re heroes of two other offbeat titles: Dav Pilkey’s Dog Breath (Blue Sky/Scholastic: $12.95) is the hilarious story of a family pet whose name--”Hally Tosis”--reveals the nature of his “horrible trouble.” Needless to say, by the end of this pun-filled adventure, problem has miraculously turned to opportunity and Hally has become a hero. Pilkey’s cartoon art is filled with humor and heart.

Mr. Lunch, the famous pooch whose profession is bird-chasing, debuted in last year’s Mr. Lunch Takes a Plane Ride. This time around Mr. Lunch Borrows a Canoe (Viking: $14.99) and, improbably, paddles all the way to Venice, where he finds the greatest challenge of his career: the pigeon-filled square of St. Mark’s. Like Hally, Mr. Lunch proves his heroic mettle while co-authors J. Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh show us their imaginative panache. Seibold, who doubles as illustrator, creates his terrifically idiosyncratic art using a Macintosh IICi computer. See it to appreciate it.

The canine’s cousin, the coyote, is the eponymous hero of Gerald McDermott’s new trickster tale, Coyote (Harcourt, Brace: $14.95) But this time it’s the trickster who is fooled when he tries to fly with the crows. Inspired by Zuni legend, the book has the look of native-American design and the warm, rich colors of its setting, the desert southwest.

American folklore is the inspiration for Anne Isaac’s original tall tale, Swamp Angel (Dutton: $14.99). It’s the rollicking story of Angelica Longrider, the greatest woodswoman in Tennessee and her amazing encounter with “a fearsome bear known as ‘Thundering Tarnation.”’ Angelica ultimately triumphs, as does illustrator Paul O. Zelinsky. A chameleon of an artist, Zelinsky brilliantly creates new styles to match the spirit of each new project. This time he affects the look of the American primitive and, to give his pictures the proper period flavor, has painted in oil on cherry, maple and birch veneers. His pictures brilliantly capture the epic energy and scope of the American frontier.

Lisa Desmini operates on a smaller scale but with equal imagination and idiosyncratic style in My House (Henry Holt: $15.95). Working with a combination of collage, paint and photographs, Desmini shows us a house in--and for--all seasons. Her house is our own cozy home but better because it is “filled with dreams.”

Writer Kathleen Krull shares whimsical and offbeat moments fromthe lives of other authors in her engaging Lives of the Writers (Harcourt, Brace, $18.95). Krull’s collaborator Kathryn Hewitt has created brilliant, full page-caricatures to capture, exactly, the tone of the text while deftly expanding, in their details, our understanding of what made these writers so--individual.

British illustrator Stephen Biesty is another specialist in detail--but on a staggering scale! The master of the intricate cross-section, Biesty this time takes us behind the scenes of a fourteenth-century castle under siege while author Richard Platt supplies the fact-filled text for Stephen Biesty’s Cross-Sections: Castle (Dorling Kindersley: $16.95). Kids will no doubt particularly enjoy the more excruciating details of weapons and punishment but the domestic details of daily life are equally captivating and crowd the oversized pages. If attention flags, the author and illustrator have added a spy to the works and invite keener-eyed readers to find him in each of the ten cross-section spreads. Castle is much more than a medieval “Where’s Waldo,” though. Like all of the titles discussed here it is an expression of the picture book’s mind-expanding capacity for combining breathtaking art and imagination.