IS IT ROUGH? IS IT SMOOTH? IS IT SHINY?

Textures, yes—but also sizes of things, numbers and kinds and colors of things. Each of the natural-color photographs in this latest Hoban album illustrates several concepts. And it's up to the viewer not only to spot them, but to find the right words for them. The easy first picture shows five round shiny pennies. . . in a small-child's palm (five fingers, smooth skin). . . on a board. The cropped, deadpan second is a close-up of a burst bubble-gum bubble—the essence of stickiness. There are other gooey things and prickly things, smooth and rough things; there's even, for wetness, a rain-spattered window. As usual with Hoban, there are contrasting and complementary pictures without any blatant thematic statement; and there isn't a picture—the piles of pretzels, the pebbly shore, the graffiti-ed truck—that isn't interesting, often story-telling, in itself. (See, for effortless impact, the small, sudsy brown hands in a bowl of shiny bubbles on the back cover.) A glorious addition to a great body of work, or vice versa.