VERMONT — IN ALL WEATHERS.

By NoelPerrin (Professor of English). With 48 colorphotographs by Angelo Lomeo and SonjaBullaty. New York: Viking Press. 1973. 96 pp.$10.95.

Do you want to delight a confirmed lover of Vermont? Do you want to persuade some hesitant inhabitant of another region to move there? Then buy Noel Perrin's Vermont - in all Weathers. Send it for Christmas but with an earnest request that not many others be urged to establish residence in what "is still a kind of rural backwater in the otherwise bulging northeast."

For Vermont is changing, as the author sadly admits. Yet it changes more slowly than other areas, and he is sure that even after another century its development will not entirely have overwhelmed its charm, green fields, flaming maples, or the sense of eternity engendered by a night of stars on snow.

This is a beguiling book. Its text shows devotion, humor, and authenticity. Mr. Perrin makes the best of Vermont as he writes of it and as he lives in it. He honestly records the difficulties and hazards of such a life. The bitterness of mornings when the car won't start, the flounderings in the mud of March, that season he calls "the unlocking." But his account of such drawbacks is more than outweighed by his roster of advantages: white villages below forested hills, air and water so far burdened by a minimum of pollution, an understanding of the ways of a simpler life that preceded the pace of our period.

The combination of an account of life in Vermont told in chapters that match each month with the superb color photography of Angelo Lomeo and his wife. Sonja Bullaty, might well be compared to Les Tres Riches Heures of the Due de Berry. Profoundly different as it is, this record of the passage of a year in Vermont today recalls the brilliant illumination of such a passage in a far distant time and place.

Writer, lecturer, and mountain climber in NewHampshire and Vermont, Mr. Haile lives on a hillabove the village of Norwich.