NONFICTION : New Lows in Publishing

THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY MEMORY BOOK with photographs by Clint Eastwood. (Warner Books: $11.95; 48 pp.). Need we say more?

But wait a sec. Whose memories? This is not a souvenir book of photos taken on the film set. No, this book actually invites you to record your own memories (of what? your own short-lived adulteries?). It’s mostly blank pages of that lovely color that old stationery stores used to call buff --before that word was appropriated for what you get at the gym. These gentle pages are then covered with sweet, soft lines spaced about the way the blue lines were in grammar-school penmanship books. Every couple of pages there is a photo, designed to look as if it’s tacked in with those little cut-out corners you used to see pasted in family albums. And under the photos, and occasionally on their own, there are quotes from Robert James Waller, author of the book “The Bridges of Madison County” (“I look through the lens, and you’re there”); Richard Lagravenese, screenwriter of “The Bridges of Madison County” (“I can’t say goodbye yet”); and William Butler Yeats, poet of some really pretty good lines that, taken out of context, can sound like the other two (“I have spread my dreams under your feet”).

At least we hope that when Yeats wrote the line that captions the photo above, “we long to tread a way none trod before,” he did not see guardrails in his mind’s eye.