Forward to the Middle Ages

MODERN 'nsention. together with the spi ead of education to many probably incapable of serious reading as a regular habit, is turning ours into a visual age that recalls times before printing and the cheap production of hooks. It may not be altogether a bad thing.
At any rate. we have the means of spreading education and knowledge by a use of pictures infinitely more plentiful and accurate than was possible in the past.
Hence the rapid increase in publication of hooks, whether of art, history. or science—and, as yet to a lesser extent, of religion —in which the illustration matters more than the text. Inevitably. most are rather expensive though they may well reach many people through libraries.
Paris in pictures
nNE of the most imposing and original we have seen is "Paris and its people—an illustrated history" (Methuen. 4 gns.). A wealth of magnificent illustration, much of it contemporary with the period, from the ichthyosaurs to Orly airport. There is a fair amount of explanation and very good indexes.
As with many books of this kind, one thinks immediately of the school library, and lucky will be the young people whose exam. studies can be illuminated by pages of this fine production.
" A Picture History of Archaeology " by C. W. Ceram (Thames & Hudson, 425.), a science so greatly popularised in days when the world's future seems to stand in the balance, does much the same for a more specialised field. Here again, apart from general readers, stimulated by Glyn Daniel's TV Seams, a -book like this should greatly widen horizons of boys and girls who find it in their libraries.
One chapter will help to fill the Archaeological background for Bible reading, and pictures-tell of Juana Inez de la Cruz, a non who in the 17th century devoted herself to the Mexicans, and the priest, Bernadino de Sahagan, who, in the wake of Cortes. devoted himself to their language and culture.
."The Saturday Book 18" (Hutchinson, 30s.) is frankly entertainment, but once again it is the happy and original combination of picture and letter-press which makes it a book to enjoy and to give to grown-ups, not children.
M.B.