LITERARY, graphic, and musical attempts to crystallize the many-faceted gem of American metropolises, New York, have been many and in some cases highly skillful. Now Agnes Rogers has arranged her New York into a book of photographs, assembled with superb judgment from the huge incoherent mass of subjects which the great city presents. Lower Manhattan at dawn, Scarsdalers waiting herd-like for the 8.52; a homeless drunk sprawled on the sidewalk, semi-human sardines jammed into the subway; Mrs. $25,000-a-year-executive smugly viewing the man-made greenness of the Bronx River Parkway; Miss $15-a-week dictation sponge engulfing a hectic ham-on-rye; sunshine on the glories of Park Avenue; the same sunshine on the littered, crowded alloys of Mike Gold's 606 playground (the East Side); Fifth Avenue jammed with taxis, limousines and fur-clad ladies with good dogs; dismal parks replete with dejected souls, magnificent churches disgorging uplifted souls; bustling symbolic Wall Street, beggars, radicals, bankers, gangsters; longshoremen--a consolidated mass of humanity, steel and stone. The book is arranged on the thin theme of a 24 hour period and attempts to follow representative types through their daily trials, labors and joys. The book is New York and thus will present a different face to every reader cold and mechanical to him who is a stranger, a vibrant, breathing, fascinating pageant to him who knows and loves this city. As a Christmas present it provides an easy answer to any problematic cases. It will be well-thumbed on glass-topped tables in penthouse apartments, in cozy, warm, overfurnished rooms in Middletown, in prim maidenly parlors on Beacon Street: for varying reasons, it is true, but with undiminished interest.