Cover Story.

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Megan O'Grady rounds up the best and brightest books of the season.

First published in 1799, Robert John Thornton's The Temple of Flora (Taschen) is the ultimate in Romantic Age florilegia. From the tuneful finch to the bivalve-loving oystercatcher, Georges-Louis Leclerc's All the World's Birds: Buffon's Illustrated Natural History General and Particular of Birds (Rizzoli), with engravings by FranAs.ois-Nicolas Martinet, is a sumptuous testament to one man's avian obsession.

Fine plumage of another sort distinguishes Jacqueline Demornex's Lucien Lelong (Thames & Hudson), a look at the couturier who invented luxury prA*t-A -porter in the thirtiesand the Romanov princess who was his muse. At long last translated into English, The Allure of Chanel (Pushkin Press) distills Paul Morand's renowned conversations with Coco Chanel in St. Moritz following World War II.

Annie Leibovitz At Work (Random House) tells the story behind such legendary images as John Lennon's symbiotic embrace of Yoko Ono or Keira Knightley's fantastical voyage as Dorothy in the pages of this magazine. Patrick Demarchelier (Steidl) is the definitive monograph on the celebrated fashion photographer. And the Victorian-era photographs in Alice Higonnet's Lewis Carroll (Phaidon) are startlingly immediateespecially those he took of Alice Liddell, the inspiration for his heroine.

A Carroll-like eccentricity infuses Lalanne(s) (Flammarion), by Daniel Abadie, about the husband-and-wife sculpting team known for, among other whimsies, a hydrangea-shaped teapot. Moscow and St. Petersburg 19001920: Art, Life & Culture of the Russian Silver Age (The Vendome Press), by John E. Bowlt, recalls that glittering era, from Anna Akhmatova to the Ballets Russes. And dancers and dilettantes alike will appreciate Robert Gottlieb's Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras (Pantheon).

Guaranteed to inspire even the most laconic of lovers is Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (FSG), edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton, while The Travels of Marco Polo (Everyman's Library) is sure to ...