Leisure Time

One might call it the perfect antidote to plunging temperatures and abbreviated sunlight: this week Abrams releases Poolside with Slim Aarons ($75.00), a frothy compendium of photographs depicting the by-the-seashore (or infinity pool) life of the leisure class through the sixties, seventies, and eighties. There’s Esther Williams, out of her boned-corset suit and sporting lemon-yellow capris, nibbling a canapé at the Lighthouse Club in the Bahamas; flip a few pages further and you’ll find the Austrian swim-capped masses bobbling in a heated pool in Bad Gastein. A favorite of those blonde-tressed society icons, C.Z. Guest and Lilly Pulitzer, Aarons, a Life photographer whose previous books include the equally glittery Once Upon a Time and A Place in the Sun, manages to pull off the impossible: even the oiled, lobster-red couples giggling at a swim-up bar in Acapulco look glamorous.