Especially for Kim

Holiday Books
Paris

By ELSA DIXLER

A burning car may temporarily have replaced the Eiffel Tower as its iconic image, but Paris remains the City of Light. This season brings several books that evoke an earlier, more romantic Paris.

Peter Barberie, in LOOKING AT ATGET (Philadelphia Museum of Art/Yale University, $45), presents 110 photographs by Eugène Atget (1857-1927), mostly from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Atget made photographs for sale - as many as 10,000 of them - chiefly to libraries and museums. He documented Paris's parks and buildings, but also its interiors, the kitchens and bedrooms of Parisians of every social class. In "Looking at Atget," the reader can compare, for example, the "Small Bedroom of a Working-Class Woman, rue de Belleville, 1910," with the "Interior of Monsieur M., Financier, avenue Elisée Reclus, Champ de Mars, 1910" (his is less cluttered, and he has a bigger bed). Atget's photographs of prostitutes (from the 1920's) and ragpickers (a decade earlier) provide glimpses of a vanished world, but those of the statues on the grounds at Versailles look absolutely contemporary.

While Atget made prints in his darkroom in Montparnasse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was at work in the emerging artists' neighborhood of Montmartre. TOULOUSE-LAUTREC AND MONTMARTRE (National Gallery of Art/Art Institute of Chicago/Princeton University, $60) - by Richard Thomson, Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Weaver Chapin - collects posters, paintings, drawings and prints from 1885-95. In addition to these indelible images of fin-de-siècle Paris at play, the book includes reproductions of work by artists who influenced Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as essays on the history of Montmartre, cabarets and dance halls, and Toulouse-Lautrec's contribution to the rising culture of celebrity.

The cancan dancers in Toulouse-Lautrec's posters could be nowhere in the world but Paris; neither could the young couple in Robert Doisneau's famous "Kiss at the Hôtel de Ville." ROBERT DOISNEAU: PARIS (Flammarion, $60), is a feast of 560 of his photographs, edited by his daughter. Doisneau (1912-94) specialized in pictures of Parisians in their everyday lives. He shows them trying to get across the Place de la Concorde, leaping filthy gutters in Les Halles and staring at a painting in a gallery window. He also shoots the city tourists love: the banks of the Seine, the gargoyles of Notre-Dame, the stalls of the bouquinistes. He even gives us Paris in the snow, just in time for a Joyeux Noël.