Booking Good

VANITIES

Jack Woody publishes beautiful books from his Pasadena living room

QUICK: What do you most want for Christmas? According to our latest survey, 99.93 percent of you answered: (a) a Wyoming cowboy, or (b) a George Balanchine ballerina. Anyone can have either now—or both—because both are readily available from Twelvetrees Press.

Twelvetrees, the self-confessed ' 'fine art book' ' publishers named after his silent-movie-star grandmother, is Jack Woody's business. It's also his passion. "I'm not interested in making Christmas presents for people," he says with quiet intensity. "All the other publishers do that. But that's the irony of it. They ended up being Christmas presents anyway. ' '

' 'They' ' are the luscious books he's been producing, sporadically, slowly, since 1980. Each is made with the sort of tender loving craftsmanship that doesn't seem to fit in the late twentieth century. Time and attention are lavished on them. The carefully chosen black-and-white-photography monographs that are his specialty—and that have caught the eye of the young, upwardly mobile collectors of art photography—are printed in Japan, Spain, or Switzerland on luxurious papers, using elegant hand-set type and luminous gravure pictures (a process no longer considered cost-efficient).

Fastidious Robert Mapplethorpe, whose Certain People was recently published by Twelvetrees, says, "I don't think I could have gotten a more beautiful book from anyone else. ' '

Running the cottage industry from his Pasadena living room, Woody, twenty-nine, has refused offers to turn Twelvetrees into a million-dollar operation. "Commercialism isn't what I'm interested in," he says.

This season, months behind schedule, there are several highly likely stocking stuffers, including: Ballet, his second portfolio of George Platt Lynes pictures. The previous one, published when Woody was twenty-three, was his first book, financed by a $700 tax refund. Ballet is the cream of George Lynes's documentation of the New York City Balletfrom 1934to 1955.

After Barbed Wire, subtitled Cowboys of Our Time, is by Kurt Markus, who says, ' 'The cowboy West has it all: drama, light, a rare purity. And when the sun comes up, cowboys ride out into it, and who could miss getting good pictures then?"

Kurt Kilgus