This is nostalgia

“He is thin, well-tailored, and as bubbly as a glass of the best French champagne.” This is how the writer Lee Bennett Hopkins described Czech-born illustrator Miroslav Sasek in “Books Are by People,” an out-of-print 1969 roundup of interviews with popular children’s authors of the day.

Hopkins’ evocative little sentence is just about the only known description of the elusive artist, who died in 1980. It’s also a fitting description of both “This Is New York” and “This Is San Francisco,” the wondrous new editions of two stunning, and long-vanished, Sasek works recently published by the Universe imprint of Rizzoli. Each book is an elegantly compact masterpiece, as suave as it is playful and as understated as it is intoxicating. Taken together, “This Is New York” and “This Is San Francisco” -- lighthearted yet exacting tributes to America’s two iconic port cities and merely two of the original 18 titles in Sasek’s globetrotting “This Is” series -- make a remarkable and instructive pair of bicoastal bookends. Amid Sasek’s vibrant renderings of archaically elongated automobiles, riotous signage, twinkling skylines and teeming, multiracial streets, we discover each city’s ostensibly timeless, indelible aura. But given an intervening four decades’ worth of booms and busts, earthquakes and assassinations, mammoth construction and terrorist plots, these books are also strangely eloquent reminders that the currents of urban life are ever-shifting and largely uncontrollable.

Wanderlust seems to have come naturally to Sasek. The biographical record is scant, but we know that he trained as an architect in Prague (where he was born in 1916) and fled when the Communists took over in 1948. He studied for a time at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and later told Hopkins, “I’m at home in Paris. “ Yet, for much of his adult life, Sasek lived in Munich (where he was employed as a commentator by Radio Free Europe), and the Bavarian city (see “This Is Munich”) became a base of operations for his explorations of cities from Venice to Edinburgh to Hong Kong (his three favorites) and forays into places like Texas, Israel and Cape Canaveral -- whirlwind encounters that he transformed, from 1959 to 1974, into the award-winning, beloved “This Is” series, a kind of volume-by-volume child’s-eye gazetteer of mid-20th century planet Earth.

In 1960, New York was the biggest port in the world. As the handy list of addenda in the new edition of “This Is New York” points out, that honor now belongs to Singapore. Likewise, the Empire State Building -- rendered here in all its vertical splendor -- has long since been overtaken by various cloud-reaching structures around the globe, including two particularly famous ones that no longer exist. Like everyone else who goes to New York, Sasek was struck by the hugeness of the place: the buildings, the noise, the traffic, the Sunday papers and the outsize bargain that originally deeded Manhattan to the Dutch. The book rather amusingly opens with Peter Minuit, in full Dutch West India regalia, trying to close negotiations with the Native Americans (“Indians” in the original 1960 version): “Okay, okay, I’ll throw in another clock.” But it’s the tiniest details that Sasek gets so right: Endless windows studded with air conditioners, rooftop water tanks that form a strange urban forest, the number 16 on Frank Gifford’s New York Giants uniform, the handgun bulging from the hip of a New York City cop (identified as such in 1960, but now left to speak for itself). “Detail is very important to children,” Sasek told Hopkins. “If I paint 53 windows instead of 54 in a building, a deluge of letters pours in upon me!” There are supermarket shelves arrayed with colorful cans (a wondrous sight to a European in 1960, even if New York still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of this American institution), garment district workers pushing dress racks along sidewalks and a particularly winning trio of “huge, fluffy squirrels. They love peanuts.” Back then, you could buy peanuts for your tree-climbing neighbors from coin-operated machines.

The coins used as change at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel were once kept meticulously clean by a special apparatus. Talk about your four-star amenities. The first thing one notices while leafing through “This Is San Francisco” is exactly the first thing a visitor notices about San Francisco itself: Not the fog or the hills or the Golden Gate Bridge but the insane tangle of electrical wires overhead: “300 days a year the western sky is blue -- but in some places you can only see it through the wires.” San Francisco was an obvious treat for the former architecture student: Sasek’s eye-popping watercolor of the Golden Gate Bridge is the most stylish you will ever see of that storied suspension, and it turns up again on a later page enveloped in a downy white fog. The bison paddock in Golden Gate Park is seen, tellingly, through the wires of a chain-link fence, a row of Peking ducks hangs from hooks in Chinatown, a thicket of sailboat masts fills Fisherman’s Wharf. And, again, the reminders of things past: The swirl of freeways dismantled after the earthquake of ‘89; Waldo and Winnie, the pair of sharks at the Steinhart Aquarium; the Ferry Building’s World Trade Center, now a farmer’s market.

Sasek created “This Is New York” (which, by the way, was also made into a short film in 1960) before that city’s World Trade Center came and went and before its Times Square went from glitzy entertainment complex to seedy porn mecca and back again. He also created both of these books before the civil rights marches, the Vietnam War and the assassinations of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Sasek happened to embark upon his “This Is Washington, D.C.” in 1968, just as the decade was reaching its frightful peak. It’s a comparatively somber affair (and the only other American city in the series), zeroing in on the colossal, impersonal architecture and, in one particularly striking image, depicting a black-suited FBI agent inspecting a gun-range target -- in the shape of a human being -- that he has successfully shot full of holes. “It was worse than Berlin in 1945!” Sasek told Hopkins of his visit to America’s capital. “One day while I was sketching the grave site of John F. Kennedy, the guards told me that I would have to leave; moments later trucks and crewmen appeared to dig the grave of Robert F. Kennedy.”

Sasek also did much of his work before the idea of design became devalued and then eventually fetishized as a sort of cult. Visually, a Sasek ink-and-watercolor shares the same handsome mid-century aura as an Eames chair, a Saarinen building or one of Arthur Getz’s expressive 1960s New Yorker covers. The palette is bold but never garish, and there’s a collage-like, sharp-edged geometry to all of his illustrations. Then there are all those smiling citizens with triangular eyes and noses who always seem mildly astonished by their surroundings. You wonder what they -- and Sasek -- would have made of Los Angeles.

The cliche about great kids’ books is that adults love them too. It’s tempting to view Sasek as a kind of roving Atget (the great photographer of Paris) capable of conjuring the spirit of whatever city he wandered in with a few brushstrokes back at the hotel. The real gauge, however, is how much kids love kids’ books. One can only hope that they’ll love these two. The world of Miroslav Sasek is, like any worthy fairy tale, both long gone and ever-present, and “This Is New York” and “This Is San Francisco” are books to get entirely lost in, over and over. What Sasek wrote of the city by the Golden Gate applies perfectly to his own astonishing work: It “has only one drawback -- ‘tis hard to leave.”