Ballets Russes

Natalya, the owner of our very informal bed and breakfast in St. Petersburg, is apologetic. We've just arrived in the Russian city for a few days, and decided to stay as guests in her family's rambling apartment on the Moika Canal. The apartment is in one of the most fashionable parts of town -- a second-floor flat not far from St. Isaac's Cathedral and just down the block from the birthplace of novelist Vladimir Nabokov. More luridly, it's across the canal from the Yusupov Palace, where about a century ago the sinister mystic Rasputin -- who bewitched a czarina -- survived being stabbed, shot and beaten.

God rest ye merry, bibliophiles, let nothing you dismay.The very unmerry economic upheavals of the past few months might have left you with a disposition like Scrooge's and a paycheck like Bob Cratchit's, but in the glittering realm of holiday gift-book publishing, every reader has not only a $100 book under the tree, but a leather-lined library in which to enjoy it. (When you run a finger over that linen binding, or check out that coffee table-busting size,...