GOOD AND BAD TASTE

An illustrated handbook to esthetic principles that govern our tastes in ""things"" today, and why they do so govern, combines scholarly and sprightly qualities as it wends its way through the maze of criteria, from functional to metaphysical, that have determined the shapes of our houses, of our chairs, of the wrench with which we fix the car. The problems Mr. Brochmann (a Norwegian whose work has been well translated here) tackles are the knotty ones of form and style and beauty. Their definition is never easy or final, but each one of the chapters successively brings a reader a little further along towards understanding the principles involved so that in the long run his own pleasure in the regulation of his surroundings will be the greater. Marginal drawings -- also by the author- are apt illustrations of the differences between old and new forms, the practical and the impractical, order and confusion.