The “Willem de Kooning: Ten Paintings, 1983-1985” exhibition at the Gagosian gallery on Madison Avenue is grand in scale and vision. An expertly chosen sampling of the best works of the artist’s late period, the paintings sing together in a room that, while full of white space, seems barely able to contain them.

       As John Elderfield notes in his essay for the show’s accompanying catalogue, it has been almost two decades since de Kooning’s late work has been explored in depth. The artist died in 1997. A group of paintings were in his Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 2011, but rather lost in the volume of other and earlier works. Despite Mr. Elderfield’s endorsement of them at the time, those paintings never really benefited by the comparison to the rest of the oeuvre.

       Add in talk about dementia and questionable authorship and there is a reason viewers tend to rush through those late galleries, their attention and interest spent on decades prior.

       Yet refocused in the hands of a gifted curator, such as Mr. Elderfield, who joined the gallery after his retirement from MoMA, where he organized the retrospective, what seemed spent and tawdry looks fresh and magnificent — a departure of the mind, perhaps, but not of the senses.

       The 10 works on view were put on sale by the artist’s foundation to raise money for an endowment. Mr. Elderfield narrowed the years of focus to give cohesion to the show and to assert that these two years comprise, as he writes, “the classic period” of that style. He then looked at each of the 10 paintings in depth, all untitled save for one, called “The Privileged,” and assigned themes to each, to help classify them in the greater scheme of the period as well as unite them to overarching motifs throughout the artist’s career.

       It can be overwhelming to see all of the paintings together. One, a late untitled work assigned the theme of “slippage,” is hung away from the rest. The separate vantage point helps makes sense of its individual merits and the subtleties of the painter’s brushstroke up close.

       In the essay, this work’s inclusion and theme lead to a discussion of the artist’s working methods during this decade. Rather than a free-flowing gesture, de Kooning relied on tracings or projections of elements of other paintings in these late works and drew outlines on the canvas that were then filled in with color and surrounded by white paint. The slippage Mr. Elderfield discusses involves a glitch in the process where the original image slips, at first accidentally and then deliberately, to create new compositions, a process confirmed by one of de Kooning’s studio assistants.

       There is a lot to be learned from the catalog, but like Matisse’s cutouts or Piet Mondrian’s Neoplasticist style, one may get the most from the paintings just by taking them in. The gallery is a room to be lingered in, to revisit, to focus on one and then another exclusive image at different times. The first visit must be devoted to the room as a whole. The dialogue between the paintings is so strong that it can be like following a dance. Despite this reductive style, the lines still seem molded by references to the figure in the most elemental way.           

       In addition to its name, “The Privileged,” from 1985, is singular in this show. It does not quite belong, but it is a work of power and beauty. One can see hints of Henri Matisse’s own late work in cutouts in it and some hints of Arshile Gorky, which Mr. Elderfield attributes more precisely back to Pablo Picasso.

       The curator discusses the cutouts in his entry for this painting, with the theme of “metamorphosis.” The palette of yellow, red, and shades of purplish blue differs from the more red, white, and blue emphasis in the other paintings. The more static accumulations of shapes also differs from the fluidity of the earlier works.

       In an essay devoted to the theme of ambiguity, Mr. Elderfield writes that the artist was likely attempting to have these paintings “stop making sense.” They can look like waves, ripples, or body contours, but they are most arresting just by contributing to the ebb and flow of the other paintings. Their asymmetry helps lead one through the gallery, implying a definitive climax before circling back onto themselves. It is a lovely ride.

       The exhibition remains on view through Dec. 21.

      While many Americans had some memory of or reaction to the recent 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Christina Haag had a more personal investment than most in the tributes and recreations of the events that day.

       Only a child herself at the time, she would come to know, befriend, and then fall in love with the president’s only son, John F. Kennedy Jr., a story she recounted as part of her memoir, “Come to the Edge: A Love Story,” published by Spiegel and Grau in 2011.

       She said in a conversation on Friday that the media coverage and presentations of the life of the former president were mostly familiar to her, but found the “American Experience” biography broadcast on PBS very moving. “They showed how as a boy he grew up, and in the pictures his mannerisms reminded me of John.”

       The dramatic loss of his father when he was just 3 years old was “incredibly tragic, but John was a positive person. His mother kept his father’s memory alive in a loving way, but they didn’t live in the past.” She said Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis told stories at the dinner table and kept his presence there among them.

       “I think John was curious about his father and did have a few stories of his own” that he remembered. “He was proud of the things he accomplished, like the nuclear test ban treaty.”

       Online, she found a home movie of the extended Kennedy family taken when the younger Kennedy was 12 with his cousins and mother in the summer at Montauk. The film shows them diving in the water. It was particularly meaningful to her because of where she wrote her book.

       Ms. Haag could have chosen Greece or Italy or any number of writers’ retreats to write her memoir several years ago, but she chose Montauk and Noyac as her places of inspiration, cementing an affinity for the East End sown in her from her first summer in Quogue when she was an infant.

       “It was instinctual. I spent my whole childhood out there every weekend and in the summer,” she said of her decision of where to write the book. “Come to the Edge” is a chronicle of her life, with the centerpiece being her long friendship and then five-year love affair with Kennedy. The best seller was well received for its insights into his life and personality, told with restraint.

       Ms. Haag will be a featured author at the John Jermain Memorial Library’s annual authors lunch on Sunday from noon to 2:30 p.m. at the American Hotel. She said that the Sag Harbor library and the East Hampton Library were two of her refuges when she needed to take a break from the solitude of writing.

       Having kept journals since her elementary school days at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York City, she said she began to feel an urge to bring them all together in book form around 10 years ago. It was more challenging than she thought, however, to cull all of the material into a cohesive whole. “It was a knock at the door that kept getting stronger.”

       She studied theater arts and English at Brown University and went on to Juilliard to pursue her love of acting, but “as I grew older my love of writing also became stronger.”

       She was living in Los Angeles primarily but came back east regularly, and trips to visit friends on the South Fork were plentiful. “I wrote chapters in Sag Harbor and Montauk early on, and the writing there came easily.”

       On the West Coast it was a different story. “I’m not a great multi-tasker. I was in a play and I thought, ‘After the play opens I’ll be writing again.’ But the play was not a good play, and I spent most of my energy on how to make it better. By this point, I had a book deal.” It was time to get serious.

       She first rented a cottage on Fort Pond in Montauk in the year before the Surf Lodge opened and through the year after, catching only the beginning of the evolving scene that became “hipster Montauk.” Fortunately, it was still quiet on the off days. She spent downtime with family and friends in East Hampton, Bridgehampton, and Amagansett. After a few weeks of kayaking on Fort Pond, “one day I stopped in the middle of the water and looked around and realized it looked similar to a place John and I water-skied on Martha’s Vineyard.”

       As the book progressed, she continued to find comparable inspiration there and in Noyac. “The walks I took — by the wide beaches at dusk, on the wooded trails and the paths between the raspberry bushes at Quail Hill Farm — were as much a part of writing as sitting down with my pen. . . . It would have been a different book if it had been written somewhere else.”

       She needed the space and the breaks from writing, which could become intense. The people she wrote about — “John, my father, Mrs. Onassis, my grandmothers” — became “very vivid, as if they were sitting by me as I wrote. They are there with you again for a time, and there is joy and sorrow in that.” At the same time, she was revisiting her “25-year-old self and reaching across the table — and in the end, understanding.”

       Given the subject matter and the infinite fascination the world has with the Kennedy family, she found herself in the whirl of book publicity, appearing on national broadcasts such as the “Today” show and in print in Vanity Fair and other publications. “Certain media outlets have their Kennedy story and they want to use you to tell their story.” She said that part was challenging, but she was glad she did it.

       Ms. Haag said that to this day some members of the paparazzi continue to recognize her (surely in part from her notoriety in the late 1980s as the girlfriend of People magazine’s “sexiest man alive,” an honor Kennedy received in 1988). That recognition has increased since the book was published. “People often want to come up and talk to me about him.” She said they respond to the description of Kennedy and his family as well as the love story in the book.

       This Thanksgiving, she was at a party and a well-known gossip columnist approached her to tell her she had spotted Kennedy with her early in their relationship. The columnist recalled that when Kennedy saw her watching them, “he put his arm around you and whisked you away. I asked him later, ‘Is this a scoop or should I let you live your life?’ He said, ‘This is special, could you leave it alone?’ ” Which she did.

       The inside story Ms. Haag tells demonstrates remarkable discipline and respect. She managed to provide enough details to make it engrossing without risking overexposure. She credited her editor and a dedicated group of readers she selected from her friends to help her gauge which incidents were most compelling and how best to present them. One of her favorite reactions to the book was from a producer friend who said, “It reads like a goodbye you didn’t get to say.”

       A shorter work will be in “The Brown Reader” anthology, to be published by Simon and Schuster in May. Ms. Haag continues to act and was recently featured in “Law and Order: SVU.” And she is currently at work on a historical novel set in New York in the 1880s. It is one she hopes to finish writing back on the South Fork, where she can take her breaks at Provisions, Indian Wells Beach at dusk, Yoga Shanti, Mary’s Marvelous, or a few of her other favorite places.

       The John Jermain Memorial Library’s lunch also features Chris Knopf of Southampton, whose latest book, “Cries of the Lost,” won a Nero Award for best American mystery. The cost is $50, and reservations can be made through Chris Tice at [email protected].

    Clinton Academy in East Hampton is celebrating the holiday season with “It’s a Child’s World: Exhibition of Antique Dolls and Toys,” which will open Saturday and remain on view through Dec. 31. Among the highlights is a Christmas village that sits beneath a tall Douglas fir, the childhood display of an East Hampton resident who has decided to share it with the community.

    The exhibition will be open Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free.

    Donna Freitas, author of “The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy,” will speak at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton on Dec. 2 at 5:30 p.m. Her talk will address the social challenges faced by young people today as they begin to lead independent lives.

    Dr. Freitas, who has a Ph.D. in religious studies from Catholic University, has written three young-adult novels, a middle-grade novel, and five adult nonfiction books, including “Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on American’s College Campuses.”

    “The End of Sex,” which was published by Basic Books in April, has generated national attention. The Atlantic called it “an important, wise, and brave new book” and The Wall Street Journal said, “Freitas’s book is a timely and alarming wake-up call.”

    The library is taking advance reservations for the talk, which is expected to draw a crowd.

    The Upright Citizens Brigade Tour Company will bring 90 minutes of long-form improvisation to the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor on Nov. 30 at 8 p.m.

    In long-form improvisation, which was pioneered by Del Close in Chicago and brought to New York City by the Upright Citizens Brigade, performers create an entire show consisting of interconnected scenes, characters, and ideas without any pre-planning or pre-writing.

    Past members of the brigade include Amy Poehler, Ed Helms, Jack McBrayer, and Rob Corddry, to name just a few. The company has theaters in New York City and Los Angeles, and a touring arm, UCB Tourco, which will be performing at Bay Street. Tickets, $25 in advance and $35 the day of the event, may be purchased from the Bay Street box office or online.

    Linda Russell, a balladeer and musician who performs early American music at historic and cultural sites around the country, will bring a musical celebration of an 18th-century Christmas to the Montauk Library on Dec. 1 at 3:30 p.m. The program, “Sing We All Merrily: An Early American Holiday,” will feature Ms. Russell on hammered dulcimer and other historic instruments; the soprano Margery Cohen, and Christa Patton on flute and harp. The group will perform carols, hymns, dance tunes, rounds, and drinking songs, interspersed with Yuletide poems, folklore, and recipes.

    Among the many venues at which Ms. Russell has performed are the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie Hall Folk Festival, the Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and on Garrison Keillor’s public radio show “A Prairie Home Companion.” The concert is free and open to the public.

    The walls are spare, painted black even, and the room would look like a tomb if the afternoon sun weren’t beaming in just so. It is what makes the show by Peter Sabbeth and Ross Watts at Sara Nightingale poetic and touching — trenchant, really, and not easy to forget.

    The Water Mill gallery is showing the Sag Harbor-based artists, as the title suggests, “In Stereo,” the way really old record albums might have similar or different sounds coming out of two channels simultaneously. The experience is shared but slightly off, destined to be heard or seen together even with disparate sources.

    If there is a problem with the show, it is that the work looks so well together in this installation that it is hard to pick one thing apart to examine in detail. Surfaces bounce off each other and then adhere somewhere else. Text is real or feigned, scrawled and rubbed out, or painstakingly cursive in a presentation that would have made second-grade teachers a generation ago very proud.

    The sense of loss, time’s passage, outmoded and obsolete technologies, practices, and forms is inherent in these rooms. To drive home the point, Mr. Watts even entombs a book of art criticism, burying a relic perhaps a tad prematurely, but highlighting its inevitable obsolescence.

    Mr. Sabbeth uses a scrawled linear means of expression that hints at handwriting but is actually mere expressive mark-making. You will find no words in his pieces, which might be drawn in charcoal, pencil, paint, ink, or crayon, on canvas or looseleaf binder paper. In the gallery installation he uses chalk on the black walls. Everything about it alludes to handwriting, but it is drawn and not written, symbolic but not allusive. It is about a mode of expression that has become lost to us. We no longer recognize the signatures and handwriting of our most intimate relationships, because they and we are no longer writing anything by hand. It has become a meaningless gesture.

    He underlines the inherent frustration in his work with his titles, which also suggest or decry meaning. “Just a Painting, Buddha Says” stands for one painting and “Rough Draft/Final Version” is the title of multiple pages of scrawl mounted on linen. “All that You Can’t Leave Behind” is big and loose with a small notebook sheet, a fragment or figment of a larger point of view. “Dear John” suggests thwarted love, misunderstanding, and endless subtext. “Attack on Memory” brings forth the notion that all of these black and white empty ruminations are a trip down the dark corridor of one person’s mind.

    Mr. Sabbeth’s works are set throughout the gallery, offering dialogue with his own pieces and those of Mr. Watts, who examines similar themes. Whether he painstakingly writes out passages from the 1960s book of art criticism or carves off cross-sections of a fish sculpture, Mr. Watts constantly appears to be alluding to something lost, fragmented, or evanescent. The lack of color in the gallery makes his one colorful piece, “Jacks,” glaring. “Jacks” is composed of cantilevered boxes pretending to be something other than what they are. Sometimes they are painted wood. In other places, they might be Styrofoam decorated to look like something else. There is balance and tension and the whole thing is ponderous, not from its weight, but from its layers.

    Mr. Watts is very taken with surface and materials, and how they can be manipulated. He likes to bury burlap in plaster and sand it down, layer by layer, until the surface looks like bone or some sumptuous ceramic concoction. Into that surface he will cut the shape of a tar paper cross-section of a bass, deep black and matte, against the refined and slightly luminescent white surface of the sanded plaster. Without context it could look like rubbings of Iron Age tools. It certainly seems heavy and weighted, fraught. Another dense composition uses gesso and tape to a similar effect, but is black-on-black and more linear, also sanded, smooth and tactilely seductive.

    But Mr. Watts also plays with words, burying them in a white box in the case of Brian O’Doherty’s “Inside the White Cube,” a collection of essays he wrote in Artforum in the 1960s and 1970s. You can’t see the book, the box is solid and painted white, in strange striated layers that look like accumulations of sediment. Practically everything in this room gives one the feeling of being on an archaeological dig. On the wall nearby is Mr. Watts’s handwritten excerpt from one of the book’s essays, “Notes on the Gallery Space.” It’s like unpacking a musty steamer trunk of associations, assertions, references, and meaning.

    Even more potent are those pieces that delve into the form and format of the sheet of paper itself. Whether stacked in tense aggregations between metal frames or in looser compositions, Mr. Watts manages to subvert our experience of the formalist manifesto for paper in original ways. In “Notis,” he coats and abrades the surface, adding tracing and rubbings to capture the irregularities of the wall’s supporting surface as the piece was being manufactured. These primed and pumped sheets are heavy stock, made heavier with the density of their additions of surface material. He hangs them evenly, eight altogether, along two metal bars that jut out from the wall, forming a kind of shield or talismanic armor, to protect this fragile monument to things near extinction.

    The show is on view through Dec. 8.

Ruffins at John Jermain

    Reynold Ruffins, an award-winning painter, illustrator, and designer, will exhibit a selection his illustrations at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor from Wednesday through Jan. 18. Mr. Reynolds, who lives in Sag Harbor, graduated from Cooper Union and received its most prestigious honor, the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award for outstanding professional achievement in arts.

    A founding member of the famed Push Pin Studio, along with Milton Glaser, Edward Sorel, and Seymour Chwast, Mr. Ruffins has taught at Queens College, the School of Visual Arts, the Parsons-New School of Design, and Syracuse University. He has illustrated more than 15 children’s books and produced the illustrations for a children’s video made with Herbie Hancock and Whoopi Goldberg.

    Mr. Ruffins’s work has appeared in trade and design publications, among them 200 Years of American Illustration, A History of Graphic Design, The Push Pin Graphic, African American Art, Graphis, and How magazine. He has been recognized in group shows in Tokyo, Milan, Bologna, and at the Louvre in Paris.

    A reception for the artist will be held Dec. 14 from 3 to 5 p.m.

Behind the Art Walk

    “Who Is Behind the Art — Meet the Owner-Curator” is the title of Saturday’s Art Walk in the Hamptons. Twenty-seven galleries from Amagansett to Southampton are participating in the tour, which offers the options of a self-guided tour or three artist-led walks. Gallery directors and curators will be available from 1 to 4 p.m.

    Roisin Bateman, a painter, will lead a tour of Bridgehampton galleries, starting at 1 p.m. at Mark Borghi Fine Art. A tour of East Hampton galleries led by Kathy Zeiger, a photographer, curator, and the director of Art Walk Hamptons, will begin at Lawrence Fine Art at 1 p.m. The Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor is the 1 p.m. meeting place for a tour led by Ingrid Liot, photographer for the Neo-Political Cowgirls.

    Participating galleries, maps, and additional information are available from artwalkhamptons.com. The event is free.

Four at Tripoli

    Four artists are featured in the 9th Annual Thanksgiving Collective, which opens Saturday at the Tripoli Gallery in Southampton. Titled “The Worlds We Create,” the exhibition includes work by Jonathan Beer, Melanie Moczarski, Aakash Nihalani, and Nick Weber. An opening reception will take place Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Mr. Nihalani uses tape in site-specific installations that engage pre-existing forms, including architecture, to alter perception of space and depth. Mr. Weber, who lives in Amagansett, paints the human form in sexual compositions that challenge the conventions of a traditional medium.

    Ms. Moczarski creates imagined landscapes, hybrid life forms, and sculptural surfaces pieced together from her own memory and speculation. Mr. Beer’s paintings combine abstract and recognizable forms within the same canvas to challenge our perception of pictorial space.

    The exhibition will remain open through Jan. 30.

Holiday Show at Kramoris

    Small artworks by more than three dozen artists make up the Holiday Invitational exhibition at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor, which opens tomorrow and will remain on view through Jan. 13. A reception with holiday cheer and refreshments will be held Sunday from 3 to 5 p.m. Additional receptions will take place Dec. 14 and Dec. 21, also from 3 to 5 p.m.

“Beyond Boundaries”

    Jane Martin’s work in video and painting will be featured in a solo show titled “Beyond Boundaries” at the Tremaine Gallery in Lakeville, Conn. The show will open with a reception on Friday, Dec. 6, and remain on view through Jan. 26. Ms. Martin, who lives in East Hampton, also has work in The Lampeter Review, a Welsh publication.

“The Boy Detective”

Roger Rosenblatt

Ecco, $19.99

    Roger Rosenblatt may have just invented a beguiling subgenre — call it mem-noir — in which remembrance loops along a dark trail of switchbacks and time-jumps like a memoir narrated by an erudite, shape-shifting shamus. The protagonist is the 11-ish Roger, who prowls his Manhattan neighborhood and his childhood as if he were a private eye. Lurking in the shadows is the 70-ish Roger, the real gumshoe, trying to figure out how everything and nothing has changed.

    “I am moved by the young women successes caressing their iPhones,” he writes, “as I was moved by their grandmothers leaning out the windows, with their deflated breasts on the rotted sills, and shrieking for their dogs to come home.”

    Mr. Rosenblatt’s last two memoirs were more traditional, and more accessible in their literary yet self-helpful way. They were Mr. Rosenblatt as reporter and then philosopher, two roles he has starred in throughout a splendid career as writer, teacher, and performer. In the best-selling “Making Toast,” he described how he and his wife, Ginny, became parents again after the sudden death of their daughter. In “Kayak Morning,” he meditated on the grief they eventually had to confront after dealing with practicalities.

    “The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood” is different, impressionistic, whimsical, and deliciously stuffed with description, commentary, asides about books, religion, movies, friendship.

    The descriptions alone make the case. Old Roger, who has been teaching a memoir-writing course a few blocks uptown, strolls onto Young Roger’s streets around Gramercy Park, still the jewel of the neighborhood. The park is private and locked. The Rosenblatts, who lived across the street, had a key to the park, which I, a nearby — but not near enough — resident for 25 years, do not. I have always wondered if the reason I don’t like the restricted and pristine park is because I am excluded from it.

    But Mr. Rosenblatt, an insider, explains my feelings to me. He describes its “studied civility” and its “smug prettiness.” He writes, “. . . for all its insistent bourgeoisie dignity [it] remained joyless even at Christmas, when the tree blazed in the park with its familiar set of lights and the accordionist from Calvary Church led the residents in the routinized singing of carols.”

    Like Marlowe or Spade, Mr. Rosenblatt is precise, laconic, remarkably unsentimental. He floats potential novels in brief passages.

    His father, a doctor and “wanna-appear” WASP, once said to him, “Roger, that’s no way for a twelve-year-old boy to behave.” Roger replied, “Dad, I’m eight.”

    Or,

    “Writing in war zones, I was made afraid not in Sudan or Beirut or even Rwanda. . . . In Belfast, however, I felt a fear so deep it froze me like Emily Dickinson’s snake. And it was born not of bombings or shootings, but rather of the hatred in the air, colder than the day is now, by which one knew how dark the soul could turn.”

    Or,

    Controlling his fury to this day over the firing of a favorite teacher for not inflating grades, he writes: “Here was a school whose Quaker educational vision allowed for the admission of one black student, just one, in the mid 1950s, and whose faculty included several outspoken anti-Semites, a couple of floozies, a leering pedophile who used to loiter around the boys locker room, at least two alcoholics who came to work with booze on their breath, a French teacher who spread rumors about the students, and a biology teacher who taught us that if a fat woman married a thin man, they would have an ordinary-size child.”

    For all his side-of-the mouth “Are you with me, pal?” the erudite, shape-shifting shamus has the soft spot of his kind. He confesses: “For all his hard-boiled patter, he believes that love defines us, that if love prevailed over all competing emotions in the first place, there would be no cupidity, no crime.”

    So mem-noir finally loops back to the messages of all Mr. Rosenblatt’s stories: “I’d pick the heart over the head any day, because everybody is smart, you know, but not everybody is kind.”

    Robert Lipsyte, the ESPN ombudsman, is author of a memoir, “The Accidental Sportswriter.” He splits his time between Roger Rosenblatt’s old Manhattan neighborhood and Shelter Island.

    Roger Rosenblatt teaches in the M.F.A. program at Stony Brook South­ampton and lives part time in Quogue.

    Billy Rayner hasn’t been to China. Or Japan. But he’s been practically everywhere else during the past 50 years and kept diaries filled with watercolors, photographs, observations, historical information, and memorabilia. “Notes and Sketches: Travel Journals of William P. Rayner,” a two-volume set, has just been published by Glitterati Incorporated, allowing readers a view into a life fully lived.

    Born in Washington, D.C., Mr. Rayner was educated at the Taft School in Connecticut and the University of Virginia before moving to New York City to work for Condé Nast as an editorial business manager and writer.

    “I started traveling extensively when I was around 30 years old,” he said, “both for Condé Nast and on my own account.” His first big trip was to Egypt, where he went to see Abu Simbel before the construction of the Aswan Dam removed it to higher ground. “You didn’t fly in then,” he recalled. “You took a two-hour hydrofoil there and spent the day.” Abu Simbel, according to “Notes and Sketches,” was more dramatic in its original location on the banks of the Nile than it is today: “Now it rests on an artificial hill, making it look more like a movie set.”

    Early on, Mr. Rayner, a longtime East Hampton homeowner, started painting. “My mother and aunt both painted, and I used to paint with them. I’ve painted all my life, one way or another. When I was working for Condé Nast I could only paint on the weekends.” He still paints every day in the studio of his Manhattan brownstone.

    He began keeping travel diaries in the 1960s, inspired in part by the aunt, also a diarist. “Her diaries were strictly painting. At first, mine were watercolor-driven; then I began to make notes — I was a writer, after all — and then started to paste things in,” wine labels and other memorabilia. Of the pyramids, he writes that “the one thing that all can agree upon is that Giza is hot, so a cold bottle of Cru des Ptolémées for lunch is a welcome relief.” He has the label to prove it.

    Publishing the journals was never a consideration. In fact, nobody, not even friends, read them. “Maybe my wives read bits and pieces,” the author admitted, “but nobody else. Diaries are things you don’t pass around.” But then came Marta Hallett, the founder of Glitterati Press, a publisher of distinctive illustrated books, ancillary gift products, and electronic media, who looked through Mr. Rayner’s collection and said she had an idea of how to publish the disparate materials.

    “She came back with what I thought was a very good idea,” he said.

    Each location is brought to life by a combination of watercolors, photographs, text both handwritten and typeset, local currency, postage stamps, even a formal invitation to Mr. and Mrs. Billy Rayner to dine in Calcutta with the governor of West Bengal, who was the great-grandson of Mahatma Ghandi. “Calcutta is on the Hooghly river, spanned by a bridge under which refugees from Bangladesh sleep, while nearby a local country club caters to the ‘staying-on’ crowd who take their tea and Pimms cup there. Then there is a marvelous museum with the work of Tilly Kettle, an 18th-century English portrait painter who worked in India, while on streets nearby are once grand houses crumbling into decay.”

    While he describes moments of comfort and relaxation, for the most part Mr. Rayner strays far from the tourist-beaten path. He often finds himself in perilous situations. Of crossing a deep gorge on a narrow, swinging, rope bridge to reach a monastery in Phuktal, India, he writes, “It is necessary to blindfold the horses and attach bells so they can neither see nor hear the water rushing below.” Trekking in the Himalayas on narrow, treacherous footpaths and driving on rutted, serpentine roads flanked by sheer cliffs make for other hair-raising tales.

    Wherever he goes, Mr. Rayner travels with a sack of brushes, paints, and “an artist’s black book you can buy at any art store. The paper isn’t great, but it’s very utilitarian, and I can get down what I want to.” He has always admired traveling artists — Hercules Brabazon, Edward Lear, Eugène Delacroix — as well as such writers as Gertrude Bell, Richard Burton, and Robert Byron, all of whom “have inspired me to want to see things far from home.”

    He explains in the introduction to the book, “I sketch rather than take photographs to remember places and moments, because I love the process. I also like to sit in front of a scene for a while to take in the surroundings and the mood so as to give the subject some texture.” Asked if there were places where he felt intrusive or endangered, he shook his head. “A painter is no threat to anybody.” Onlookers often surround him as he works, and he has been warned countless times about pickpockets, but “never in 40 years have I ever lost so much as a pencil.”

    Volume I of the book is devoted to North Africa and the Middle East, including Turkey. Many places in the region are now out of bounds, since he was there, Mr. Rayner said, including Libya, Egypt, and Syria. “We were in Syria just before the war. There were hardly any tourists, but it was perfectly calm. We would go out to dinner with friends — some place that couldn’t be bugged — and talk politics. They said, ‘We don’t like Assad, but at least we know the devil. We don’t know what the next devil will be.’ ”

    Aleppo, he said, having been conquered by the Greeks, Romans, Mamelukes, Byzantines, Ottomans, and French, was an extraordinary mélange of architectural styles. “I’m afraid it’s all gone,” he said ruefully. “But it’s not only wars that change places. Tourism does, too. Though if you had to choose between the two, you’d take tourism.”

    Years ago there were very few tourists in Turkey, he mused, but it has lately become a popular destination, especially Istanbul and the Mediterranean coast. However, the interior of the country, where he has traveled extensively, hasn’t changed, he said, and tourists are a rarity there. During one visit he spent seven days driving through eastern Turkey over unpaved roads, staying in primitive lodgings. “Places like Lake Van, Erzurum, the area near the Russian border, probably haven’t changed much in 1,000 years,” he said.

    What emerges vividly from Mr. Rayner’s diaries is a fascination with far-flung, often exotic, locales, and a wide-ranging knowledge of people, history, and culture. It’s safe to assume it won’t be long before he crosses Japan and China off his to-visit list.

    Billy Rayner will be at BookHampton in East Hampton on Saturday from 5 to 6:30 p.m. to sign books and talk about his peregrinations.