Many rarely seen images by the renowned Californian photographer Ansel Adams are reproduced in a new book edited by Andrea G. Stillman. “One of the first things I noticed about California was the quality of the light,” writes Stillman. “It was almost palpable, as if you could reach out and touch it. It was light that inspired Ansel to photograph, and it was his preternatural feeling for light that made his work approach the sublime. He worked almost exclusively at dawn or sunset; the rest of the time he found the light too flat, the forms of the landscape dull and uninteresting.” The pictures in Ansel Adams California (Little, Brown, $50) are accompanied by writings about the state by classic and contemporary authors from Robert Louis Stevenson to Jack Kerouac.