SEASON S READINGS: Get an eyeful of art and photography go

If you're a regular reader of this section, chances are that you value the printed page over the pixilated screen. So I'm a little embarrassed to admit that my favorite illustrated book of the year is based on a blog. The inspiration of an anonymous Australian who goes by the initials "PK," BibliOdyssey (bibliodyssey

.blogspot.com) is that rare thing, a Web site that deepens the reader's love for all that has been accomplished over the centuries with ink and a printing press. The images that PK posts, drawn from what he describes as the "digital labyrinths of national and university libraries," are beautiful or eccentric or both - illustrations from Japanese whaling manuals, say, or 19th century engravings of anthropomorphized vegetables. With the help of hip British design team Fuel, a selection of PK's computerized gleanings has been assembled in book form as "BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images From the Internet." Like the best illustrated books, it offers the reader aesthetic and intellectual pleasure.

Leafing through PK's cabinet of curiosities, I couldn't help thinking how much artist Maira Kalman would enjoy "BibliOdyssey." (I imagine she'd especially like Eliza Brightwen's 1895 etching of her pet lemur sitting on a hassock in front of a fireplace.) Kalman is best known for her children's books and her prolific magazine illustrations, but "The Principles of Uncertainty," a collection of hand-painted autobiographical musings, is her magnum opus. "How can I tell you everything that is in my heart," she begins, then unpacks that great organ to reveal fruit platters, Johannes Kepler, sponges, pom-pom hats, Dostoyevsky, a candy-striped water tower, and some kind of crazy Parisian dessert called a croque choux nougatine, all portrayed in her inimitable, pastel-shaded urban-folk style. Kalman seems delighted by just about everything in the world, but "The Principles of Uncertainty" has an undercurrent of heartbreak, a sense that such delight is a necessary weapon against chaos and loss.

Like Kalman, the contributors to "Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects With Unexpected Significance" take to heart William Carlos Williams' famous dictum "No ideas but in things." Editors Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes have tapped writers and artists to reflect on a talismanic possession. Cartoonist Bill Griffith remembers discovering the brand of soda whose name he swiped for his Zippy character; novelist Lydia Millet reveals how a tacky plastic dog (crying a single long plastic tear) that she purchased at a thrift store acted as a peculiar aphrodisiac for her and an ex-boyfriend; artist David Scher owns the arm of the sofa where his mother liked to drink Manhattans and play solitaire.

Photographer Liz Workman also looks for traces of meaning in everyday objects - for her book "Dr. Johnson's Doorknob and Other Significant Parts of Great Men's Houses" she visited the homes of famous authors, painters, scientists and heads of state, snapping close-up pictures of Sigmund Freud's desk, Edgar Allan Poe's soup tureen and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's skirting board. But there's more here than just attention to the trivial. As Germaine Greer points out in her introduction, Workman is observing the parts of Great Men's homes that are usually left in charge of little-known women. It was the wives and servants, after all, who made the beds, washed out the crockery and polished all of those doorknobs.

We certainly don't find out who's doing the chores at the mansions and penthouses on display in "Vogue Living: Houses, Gardens, People," a glossy volume of features reprinted from the pages of the fashion monthly and its home decor offshoot. I fought this book every page of the way. Madonna dyeing the sheep at her Wiltshire estate Easter-egg colors? Burn the rich! Donna Karan blowing aromatherapeutic oils (specially blended each morning) through the ventilation system of her Manhattan apartment? To the Bastille! I threw the book aside in disgust, only to have it fall open to an amazing 17th century Dutch farmyard painting that designer Tory Burch has hanging in her living room - a painting like that would really spruce up my rented Brooklyn one-bedroom. And I can imagine being quite happy passing my afternoons with a good book in art collector Janet de Botton's Provencal garden, which comes complete with labyrinth and lavender bed.

History and geography

It would have been enough for David McCullough to upgrade his chronicle of the most significant year of the Revolutionary War (and, possibly, of American history) by adding some famous portraits of key figures and paintings of battle scenes. In "1776: The Illustrated Edition," the works of such 18th century artists as Copley, Stuart, Trumbull and Gainsborough, as well as reproductions of period engravings, newspaper articles, pamphlets and political cartoons, bring McCullough's account to vivid life. But what makes the new version so dazzling is the addition of several envelopes, sewn into the book's binding, containing 37 facsimiles of letters, maps and documents from the era. It seems like a gimmick, but it's pretty hard to resist holding in one's hands an invitation to dine with the Washingtons, or a period map of New York that outlines the span of the Great Fire. (Unfortunately, the text itself is given short shrift. The title page describes the volume as "excerpts from the acclaimed history.")

A map, writes Vincent Virga in the introduction to his splendid "Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations," is "a dream, an idea, an action, an emblem of human endeavor." Virga - described as "America's foremost picture editor" - traces the history of the quest to organize knowledge through more than 200 maps drawn from the Library of Congress collection, from a Mesopotamian agricultural plan chiseled in cuneiform on a clay tablet (circa 1500 BCE), to a recent visualized diagram of the Internet. Along the way, there's an Egyptian map of the path to paradise, an early and exquisite three-dimensional survey of Paris, a map of the Low Countries in the shape of a lion, an expedition guide to the Rocky Mountains, and a plan of the original MGM Studios.

The maps in "Cartographia" have political, spiritual or navigational purposes. The subway plans in "Transit Maps of the World" might appear to have a more mundane function, that of helping commuters and tourists find their way around. But for a certain kind of urban transportation fanatic ("straphangers," as they call themselves), this book is the stuff that dreams are made of. Every subway system, major and minor, is included, from the complex spider webs of New York, London and Tokyo to the comparatively dinky one- and two-line railways that run through Bratislava, Slovakia; Yerevan, Armenia; and Jakarta, Indonesia.

It's hard to know what to make of the The Onion's faux-atlas "Our Dumb World." It's as funny as all get-out, but it also leaves a sour taste in one's mouth, if only because the political realities it satirizes are so brutal. The book cleverly mimics an actual atlas, with each country getting its own page or two and an "I can't believe I'm reading this" subhead, such as Uganda ("No Child Left Alive"), France ("One Nation Above God"), the Bahamas ("This Luggage Isn't Going to Move Itself") and India ("Please Hold While We Die of Malaria"). Some of the jokes are benign enough - Belgium gets lampooned for its chocolate production, har har. The more relevant barbs leave you thinking about how terrible things really are. The map of Saudi Arabia, for example, points out the sites of a "state-of-the-art woman-killing facility," a "man wearing gay-looking shirt being stoned to death" and the "George W. Bush Presidential Library." A survey of human stupidity and intolerance in all its forms, "Our Dumb World" may be the feel-queasy gift of the season.

Travel

It's a familiar story: You travel somewhere beautiful, someplace exotic, such as, for example, Venice, and when you arrive at your pensione, there's a McDonald's across the street. (This happened to me just last month.) "Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums" is the perfect antidote to the encroaching homogenization of the planet - not to mention long waits on the runways at JFK. Editors Barbara Levine and Kirsten M. Jensen have reproduced whole, intact pages from the albums and scrapbooks of everyday early 20th century travelers, complete with hand-scribbled captions ("Before Kit got seasick!"). On a 1909 mountain-climbing trip to the Alps, for example, S.D. Stevens framed stunning compositions of sky, clouds and glaciers (most likely melted by now). California flapper Vera Talbot's 1924 album is a hodgepodge of snapshots from her voyage to Southeast Asia: rickshaws and sampans, monkeys and elephants, Burmese temples and Siamese dancers. These black-and-white images, taken by amateur photographers with inexpensive cameras, capture a world that looks pristine and uncluttered, full of wide-open spaces and ripe for discovery.

Between 1850 and 1950, a handful of courageous women ventured into that world, some to follow a higher calling, some for the pure joy of being in motion. "Women Travelers: A Century of Trailblazing Adventures" - a handsome collection of brief, illustrated lives written by Alexandra Lapierre, the author of a novel about artist Artemisia Gentileschi - features a few familiar faces, including Karen Blixen, Margaret Mead and Gertrude Bell. But most of these voyagers are little-known, such as Mary Seacole, a Caribbean boardinghouse keeper who traveled to the Crimea to bring medicine to wounded British soldiers; Isabella Bird, a Cheshire parson's daughter who crossed the Rockies on horseback for the love of a bandit; Dublin-born Daisy Bates, who found a lifelong home among the Aboriginals of Australia; and Alexandra David-N el, a French Buddhist who penetrated Tibet at a time when it was closed to foreigners.

The travelers who sport through the pages of "First Class: Legendary Train Journeys Around the World" had a much easier time: luxury sleeping berths, gourmet dining cars and a safe, comfortable seat from which to view the scenery. Train aficionado Patrick Poivre d'Arvor traces 11 epic railroad routes, including the Orient Express (London to Athens, Istanbul and Odessa), the Trans-Siberian Railway (Moscow to Vladivostok), and the Canadian (Vancouver to Toronto). The book neatly blends archival and contemporary photographs - all of the romance of rail travel, these charming images say, is still within easy reach.

A mid-century train passenger, out for a stroll during a station layover, might have come across some of the strikingly designed advertisements for Italy's balmy Mediterranean towns and resorts collected in Lorenzo Ottaviani's "Travel Italia: The Golden Age of Italian Travel Posters." Painted by mostly forgotten artists, these posters worked their magic with brilliant colors and simple, idealized recreations of the country's lushest travel destinations. The dusty blue of Le Lac Majeur is underlined by bright red roses; the hills of Alto Adige are a zigzag of green hues; Naples is represented with a near-Cubist arrangement of sailboats, lovers playing the guitar and, in the distance, gray Vesuvius, innocently puffing away.

New York

Plus a change... The Gothamites scurrying around "Up and Down New York," a reprint of a 1926 book, wear different clothes and hats than the ones you're likely to see on the city's streets today, but they're as rambunctious as we are. Illustrator Tony Sarg - also a puppeteer who created the first balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade - carried out his vision of New York as a grand example of chaos theory with this successful series of large-scale "bird's-eye views" of familiar urban locations. In a cartoon of Grand Central Station, pedestrians and commuters of all colors, sizes and shapes run in every direction, bumping into one another, knocking off their hats and poking each other with umbrellas. One of the joys of this book is the chance to see so many of the city's lost landmarks, such as the elevated train running through "Greeley Square" (that's Herald to you and me) or the old New York Aquarium at Battery Park.

John Sloan was a member of the "Ashcan School," a group of painters who took as their subject the gritty streets of New York and the working poor. But Sloan envisioned the city in a kind of halcyon glow, all sunsets and streetlights, Bohemians and models and strolling passersby, illuminated fountains and shop windows. Greenwich Village children play in the twilit street outside of Jefferson Market Jail as snow begins to fall; a couple on a nighttime walk choose Easter flowers from a storefront dis- play; a man and his son release pigeons from the roof of a sun-washed brownstone. The paintings collected in "John Sloan's New York" are moody and pensive, but they let in all sorts of light.

A much different city, captured half a century later, is the subject of Tod Papageorge's "Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park." Papageorge, the head of Yale's photography department, has taught such contemporary luminaries as Gregory Crewdson and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, but this is the first book of his own 45-year career as a photographer. Mostly taken in the 1970s and early '80s, these are stark, spontaneous black-and-white pictures of the park's gnarlier forms of life, both plant-based and human. Urbanites - straight and gay, old and young, pretty and haggard - sit propped up on benches or sunbathe in various states of undress, looking a little like dead bodies; lovers collapse upon one another, limbs akimbo. These New Yorkers look flattened and exhausted, as if the life of the city had steamrolled them - the park is their refuge. Still, there's something rough and sexy about these pictures, which imagine the city as an untamed wilderness.

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