THE MAGIC OF SPAIN. A CASUAL GUIDE. PARTICULARLY THE COSTA BRAVA AND MALLORCA.

By WilliamJ. Bryant '25. Springfield (Vermont): TheMeeting-waters Press, 1967. 159 pp. $9.75.

The emphasis is on the picturesque past. Mr. Bryant chooses largely to ignore the new Spain where forty percent of Spanish families have television, a middle class is forming, installment buying is in vogue, sales of automobiles and foreign tourists hav£ created traffic problems, basketball enthusiasm induces apathy about soccer, and factories producing goods and smoke are arising by the score about principal cities. Though he may show a modern "camping" site on the Costa Brava, he prefers the old, the unique, and the exotic.

Below the Pyrenees in Port Bou whitewashed and red-tiled, he will allude to the Basques in Perpignan who have survived Celtic, Roman, Visigoth, and even Arabic days and may still be seen as "solemn sardana dancers carefully counting the beats to blaring trumpets and plaintive flutes."

In thirteenth-century Cadaqués, painters delight in little coves with miniature beaches, a medieval church, and stone walls dividing small properties and lining the paths. In Port Lligat, Salvador Dali's home fascinates because his stark, cubic white house contrasts with the deep blue of the sea. Spain's Pompeii is the ancient Greek city of Emporion with its temple of Aesculapius. The walls, towers, and gates in Tarragona enable one to commune with the .Iberians, that race of dark and small people who came into the peninsula from Africa thousands of years ago. A favorite of philosophic historians, Tarragona happily blends Roman, medieval, and modern.

Ascetically removed from urban temptations are the great monasteries. No mortifier of the flesh, however, Mr. Bryant enjoys S'Agaró with its luxurious hotel La Gavina, seeks out Barcelona's port area, strolls under the palms of Alicante, views the fruit on the main thoroughfare of Baza, basks in one of the formal but intimate gardens in the Alhambra, amuses himself after Holy Week in Seville during the feria with dancing and decorations, swims in the pool of Son Vida high above Palma de Mallorca, and visits a Goya exhibition in Madrid. He sips Manzanilla (dryest of sherries, preferred by Spanish palates), Chartreuse, and the wines from Rioja, Tarragona, and Malaga.

But most of all the footsteps and voices of the past delight Mr. Bryant: the folk dances of Alcudia, the cave dwellers of Andalusia, the professional water carriers of Medina Sidonia, the Palos monastery where Columbus left his son, the thatched huts of the great Andalusian estates hardly affected by the 1960's, the moorish walls of Niebla.

The writing carries more authenticity than the pictures, which are more impressive for dramatic settings than for fidelity to color. The blue skies and blue water often seem factitious. If you were to produce 76 colored slides yourself, you would need about three months of travel, a $100 camera, $100 worth of slides, and fluent Spanish. You had better save $191.25 by buying the book.