Gift books: oversize, overstuffed, outrageous
The largest and most expensive book published in the 17th century is one of the largest and most expensive gift books published in time for the Christmas season 2005 -- ''Atlas Maior of 1665," prepared and published by the Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu (Taschen, $200). The 593 pages reprint a hand-colored copy of the atlas that is in the national library of Austria; it is gorgeous, heavy, and fascinating. Most of North America was still little known in the 17th century, and Blaeu did not have access to some of the best maps, which were still closely guarded by the governments that were vying to explore, and control, the area. Each section of maps is preceded by an allegorical drawing. America's features a seminude female Native American, skirted in feathers, and standing atop a severed head that has been pierced through by an arrow; cherubs and a conquistador fly aloft, and the other figures on American soil are additional Native Americans mining what looks like gold. Nearby crouches what the scholarly annotator Peter Van Der Krogt calls a ''lurking armadillo," although it looks more like an alligator or a crocodile.
The other huge book, also from Taschen and also $200, is ''Jazz Life," a collection of photographs and essays documenting a journey across America in search of jazz by the photographer William Claxton and the writer and jazz maven Joachim E. Berendt back in 1960. The book was initially published a year later, and has become a collector's prize. Claxton has written a new preface and has included many additional photographs. Famous names and faces are here -- Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, as well as many figures not as well known or now forgotten, all caught in the clothes, hairstyles, and social context of the America of 45 years ago. Best of all, with the CD that's included, you can hear recordings Berendt made on the trip -- singing in a church in Zachary, La., or Coltrane improvising on Irving Berlin's ''Soft Lights."
Another, more modest, jazz volume, ''The Billboard Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues," edited by Howard Mandel, comes from Billboard Books ($45). The encyclopedia is divided by decades, defined by key artists (Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, and Gerry Mulligan from the 1950s; Wynton Marsalis and Pat Metheny from the '80s). There are also short biographies of other artists, and a chapter on instruments and equipment. The approach of the present provokes commentary both mournful (''At every turn, economic factors and new trends threaten not only the maintenance, but the very growth and development of jazz") and contentious (Diana Krall's ''accessible stylings led to international festival tours, bestselling recordings, and increasingly nuanced vocal shadings").
Classic American popular music is the subject of Ken Bloom's ''The American Songbook: The Singers, the Songwriters, and the Songs" (Black Dog & Leventhal, $34.95). This handsome volume profiles more than 50 singers, from Armstrong, Louis, to Wiley, Lee; nine big bands; and more than 50 songwriters or songwriting teams (Harold Arlen to Vincent Youmans). There are also essays on diverse topics, including song pluggers and, appropriately, Christmas songs. No one was interested in publishing ''Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and vaudeville and radio star Eddie Cantor had no interest in singing it, but Cantor's wife, Ida, convinced him to do it. ''Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was written at the request of the Montgomery Ward department stores and mail-order catalog as a Christmas giveaway; the company gave the rights to the author, Robert L. May, and he asked his brother-in-law to make a song out of it. Singing cowboy Gene Autry recorded it and sold 30 million copies. The essay points out the ironic fact that many of the most popular Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers or lyricists. About the only thing missing is any reference to 1953's ''I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas."
The most famous commercial Christmas song of all is Irving Berlin's ''White Christmas," and it naturally turns up in David Leopold's ''Irving Berlin's Show Business" (Abrams, $50). Written for the 1942 film ''Holiday Inn," and introduced on the radio by Bing Crosby before the release of the film, the song became, Leopold amusingly writes, ''the most popular song and the most widely recorded song of all time, and it would finally win an Oscar for the songwriter." Berlin himself believed that the timing was a factor in the song's success. ''[It] seems to have a quality that can be applied to the world situation as it exists today. . . . While it isn't a war song, it can be easily associated with it." The book is full of wonderful pictures and lore.
A different kind of music is celebrated by Anton Corbijn's ''U2 and I," the prize rock book of the season, a documentation of a 22-year friendship between the band and the Dutch photographer who created their visual image, who made pictures that sounded like the music the band created (Schirmer/Mosel, $120). The book also has the most amazing collection of diverse prefaces by fans of the band, including former president Bill Clinton, filmmaker Wim Wenders, Michael Stipe of R.E.M., and novelist Salman Rushdie (''U2 and Anton Corbijn deserve each other. They're strange in the same way").
A hoot is a little book by Diana Friedman, ''Sitcom Style" (Clarkson Potter, $29.95). A fashion and design writer, Friedman analyzes the interior decoration of 30 years of ''America's Favorite TV Homes," from ''I Love Lucy" to ''Sex and the City." Consider the ''elegant but edgy masculine look" of Will's apartment in ''Will and Grace," a fusion of ''Asian, European and antique elements," including a framed cover of Boy's Life magazine. The set decorator confesses that the set has timeless appeal, but every year she shops to ''upgrade the accessories." No detail is too tiny to escape the designer's notice: ''To keep Carrie's lifestyle believable [on 'Sex in the City'], the production team would empty portions of lotions and switch out shampoos in the bathroom."
Another hoot is ''Ladies or Gentlemen: A Pictorial History of Male Cross-Dressing in the Movies," by Jean-Louis Ginibre (Filipacchi, $65). The subject may seem slightly outre, but cross-dressing in the theater goes back to the ancient Greeks, and Shakespeare's great female roles were played by boys. This book surveys the issue from silent movies to the present, and there's a delightful introduction by John Lithgow, who has appeared in six roles that required him to dress as a woman. Cinematic cross-dressers have included such unlikely figures as Frank Sinatra, who decked himself out as a harem girl in ''On the Town" or, more recently, Vince Vaughn (''Psycho"). We wonder if Jennifer Aniston has seen it.
A more serious cinematic book is ''The Stanley Kubrick Archives" (Taschen, $200). This contains images from all of the great director's films, presented without commentary, as well as an equally large section of documents related to the films drawn from the Kubrick archives. The book, another luxury product, includes a CD with a 1966 interview with Kubrick and a strip of frames from a print of ''2001: A Space Odyssey" owned by the director. Some readers may be drawn especially to the section on ''Lolita," perhaps not the filmmaker's finest effort, but one of the most difficult projects he ever undertook. The chapter begins with a reproduction of a telegram from the creator of Humbert Humbert and the nymphet -- ''I might consider it . . . Nabokov" -- responding to an offer to write the screenplay. He subsequently submitted a 400-page draft, and Kubrick's producing partner James B. Harris remarked that they could ''hardly lift the script, much less film it.'
Heading the list of three prize sports gift books is ''Red Sox Century," by Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson (Houghton Mifflin, $40), originally published in 2000 and updated to include the breaking of the curse in 2004. Among the contributors are Peter Gammons and Boston Globe writers Charles Pierce and Dan Shaughnessy. ''The Football Book," from the editors of Sports Illustrated (Sports Illustrated, $29.95), collects some of the best articles and photographs that have appeared in the magazine over the last 50 years, together with some new material, including, as a kind of pregame show, an amusing collection of advertisements and endorsements featuring football stars of the past (Frank Gifford with a Lucky Strike, Ray Nitschke with a Stihl American chainsaw). ''Hoops" (Abrams, $35) surveys pro basketball from 1965 to the present in photographs by Walter Iooss Jr. and text by Mark Jacobson.
For history buffs, there is Robert Bittlestone's ''Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer's Ithaca" (Cambridge University, $40). The exact location of Ithaca, described in such detail by Homer, has eluded researchers for two millennia. Satellite imagery, NASA technology, and computer analysis of complex data have provided a new and compelling hypothesis of where it was, one that matches the Homeric descriptions in the way that the city Heinrich Schliemann discovered in the 1870s matches the poet's descriptions of Troy. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning ''A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House," first published in 1965, appears in an abridged edition, but augmented by hundreds of photographs and reproductions of documents that the original, full text lacked (Black Dog & Leventhal, $35).
One of the treasures of last year's gift-book season was a new annotated two-volume collection of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Now W. W. Norton and annotator Leslie S. Klinger have followed it up with a hefty 907-page volume collecting the four Holmes novels ($49.95). Again Klinger's effortless erudition comes close to matching Holmes's own, and no Baker Street habitué, regular or not, is going to want to be without this edition; it may even bring new members into the neighborhood.
Finally there's a new ''special illustrated edition" of Bill Bryson's best-selling ''A Short History of Nearly Everything" (Broadway, $35), first published, unillustrated, in 2003. Bryson's book is about the earth, its prehistory, and the history of people trying to understand its prehistory, and it covers a lot of ground in 600-some fizzy pages. ''Nearly everything" is of course a humorous exaggeration. For the long history of everything else, you will need to consult the tall, weighty stack of other gift books.
Richard Dyer is a member of the Globe staff.
