L.A. INSIDE OUT <i> By Betty Goodwin and Paddy Calistro Photographs by Grey Crawford (Viking Studio Books: $40) </i>

Everyone agrees it’s not an easy town to get a fix on; now, thanks to Betty Goodwin and Paddy Calistro and Grey Crawford, the newcomer can see patterns where there was only sprawl, architectural history where there was haphazard building, neighborhoods where there were only interconnecting freeways and apartment complexes, the spirit of the car where before there was only gridlock.

It all began with the Pueblo, and the 44 men and women who first settled here in 1781 near the Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, and with the first urban sprawl of ranchos after the Mexican Revolution in 1822. In the late 1800s, price wars between Southern Pacific Railroad and the Santa Fe Railroad brought the cost of a ticket from Kansas City to Los Angeles down to $1. Indeed, much of L.A.’s architecture has been a response to large periodic influxes of people--like the Bungalow style house that became a craze in 1900, when the population of Los Angeles increased tenfold. Bungalows were fast and cheap, and they were furnished and decorated by followers of the Craftsman style, pioneered by Gustav Stickley of Syracuse N.Y.

While the book spotlights individual houses as examples of architectural trends and design traditions, there are also wonderful sections on the personal fetishes of several Anglenos--for religious artifacts, indian jewelry, or cars, like the 1948 Delahaye at right, originally priced at $25,000.