Grand Luxe: The Transatlantic Style

``Barely a century old, yet already afloat in the distant past.'' Brinnin ( The Sway of the Grand Saloon ) and Gaulin (designer and free-lance writer) here celebrate, in approximately 300 pictures and a lucid, entertaining text, the glory days of the luxury liner. Opulence at sea, we learn, began in the 1880s when Johannes Poppe, a German architect, placed traditional, land-based decoration aboard his ships, changing ocean crossings ``from ordeals to be endured into pleasures to be savored.'' Reproducing period pictures, postcards, shipboard menus, advertising copy and press releases, the authors affectionately and playfully re-create ``50 years of extravagance and folie de grandeur ,'' as the great international linersthe Queen Mary , Normandie , Berengaria , Leviathan , etc.each fitted out according to a different idea of what their socially prominent passengers required, sail through the pages of this heftily priced book. (Nov.)