John Matthews begins "Pirates" with a note thanking Jerry Bruckheimer, the movies' producer, "for inspiration." But don't hold that against him. The grinning skull on the cover, with a real red (costume) jewel glistening in its eye socket, foretells an abundance of good stuff inside, and a stupendous attention to detail. The effort that went into making this jam-packed scrapbook, full of maps, pictures and facsimile documents, is likely to be matched by the time you'll spend poring over it with a pirate-struck girl or boy.

Matthews gives passing mention to the Vikings, the Barbary corsairs of North Africa and the pirates of the South China Sea. But then he takes you where you really want to go: the Caribbean, in piracy's "golden age," roughly 1660 to 1730, when ships taking a continent's worth of colonial plunder back to Spain were irresistible targets for seafaring robbers.

This book's nutritional value is extremely high. Illustrations show what hardtack (and weevils) looked like, how pirates dressed and how to make salmagundi, a pirate dish of cabbage, chicken, egg yolks and anchovies, garnished with grapes and nasturtiums. "Pirates" doesn't romanticize a thuggish profession. The discreet bloodstains on the page and pictures of dirty surgical tools are a nice touch. One drawing shows how Capt. William Kidd ended up: shackled, trussed like a chicken and hanging from a gibbet.

Less explicitly drawn but no less gruesome is "Blackbeard's Last Fight," by Eric A. Kimmel, illustrated by Leonard Everett Fisher. Its subject is the dread pirate Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, depicted here as a bucktoothed brute with a mass of facial dreadlocks and smoldering fuses under his hat. But the author imagines him having a soft side, too, in this tale of the mercenary ambush off North Carolina that ended Blackbeard's life in 1718. We see it through the eyes of Jeremy, a cabin boy on a ship whose captain is hired to carry out the plot.

The details of the ambush and ensuing battle are fascinating. But things get loopy when, in the middle of the fuss, Jeremy snatches Blackbeard's empty pistol and bonks him on the head with it. Blackbeard salutes the lad for his bravery, and moments later lies dead. His head is chopped off and hung from the bowsprit, and his body thrown overboard. His last act, as a headless corpse, is to wave to Jeremy before sinking into the sea. I'm giving away the ending, but it's the kind of ending I thought parents of younger children might want to know about.

The prettiest book of this lot, but the weakest, is "Blackbeard the Pirate King," written by J. Patrick Lewis and illustrated with eye-catching pirate paintings by N. C. Wyeth and others. It's a story "told in verse" — dreadful verse.