He has managed to communicate quite nicely over the decades without them.

Since 1927, when he sold his first illustration to The New York Times, his black and white line drawings have spoken volumes all by themselves.

A New York Times reviewer this month said Hirschfeld accomplishes on a blank page with his pen and ink in a few strokes what many of us need a lifetime of words to say."

Few would disagree.

Hirschfeld's amazing body of work - mostly his theater and arts illustrations for the Times - is now being laid out on 306 pages in Hirschfeld: Art and Recollections From Eight Decades (Scribners, $50).

The arrival of the book and the predictable book-tour publicity, has him a bit bemused.

"If you live long enough, everything happens," he says.

At 88, and still sporting the now-white Santa beard he's had since his days as a young artist in the bohemian Paris of 1924, Hirschfeld has seen most everything. On Broadway. Off Broadway. Previews. Opening nights. One-night flops.

He is the legend on the aisle, sketching in the dark.

It wasn't always that way.

When he began his now 64-year relationship with the Times, Hirschfeld left his illustrations with the man at the newspaper's front door. His first illustration brought $35.

"I was thrilled," he says. "Yes indeed."

Today the Times sends a messenger to pick up the latest Hirschfeld, which has become as coveted as a Tony award.

As former new Yorked critic Brendan Gill notes, there are two forms of fame on Broadway: "Seeing your name in lights and more significantly, to be drawn by Hirschfeld."

His ability to capture a subject's unique spirit is still a mystery. Even to him.

"I keep trying, trial and error, until something accidentally happens, and I know it when it does," he says. "I concentrate on the line and the magic it has. I'm still enchanted by its potential."

If he has no choice, he'll sketch from photos or videotapes, but he prefers to watch the actors live on stage. It is then he can capture the spirit.

He says he likes only the last drawing he's done, and he doesn't quite understand why some of his earlier work is included in the new book.

"One of the young editors insisted on putting in a lot of things I thought were terrible," he says. "I don't know why the Times bought them back then. I guess they saw something in them I didn't."

The Times, and many others, saw the Hirschfeld magic.

"He taps into the images of what we carry around in our heads - an afterimage," says Margo Feiden of Manhattan's Margo Feiden Galleries, which represents Hirschfeld.

"With Carol Channing, say it's not that he captures what she looks like, but what we remember about her. It's that that he's tapped in to."

If you want Hirschfeld to tap into your image, he does private commissions beginning at $6,500. He's presently doing one for $150,000. If you just want to own an original Hirschfeld, the price starts at $2,700 and goes up to $20,000, say, for drawings from The Phanton of the Opera or Les Miserables.

"I don't recall anyone even coming close to what he has done," says Peanuts creator Charles Schultz.

"Not only do we admire the way he captures the likeness of the people," says Schultz, "but cartoonists have always admired his technique, his elegant pen line and his sense of arrangement - all the things that make great cartooning."

Just don't call Hirschfeld a caricaturist. He hates big heads sitting on small bodies.

"I don't think there's anything witty about making a nose bigger," he says. "My feeling would be to leave the nose out completely."

Constance Rosenblum, editor of the Arts and Leisure section of the Times, says the arrival of the newest Hirschfeld in her office still evokes excitement. "There's always a public viewing," she says.

Hirschfeld has never missed a deadline, and no work has ever been sent back.

"His drawings make the theater seem like a lot of fun," adds Rosenblum. "It makes it someplace you want to be."

Some Hirschfelds can be very elaborate, a stage full of actors, for instance, but they are not his favorites.

"When I can't get it right, I embroider," he confesses. "When it's right, it's right, and it doesn't need any other visual comment." He calls the process "a perpetual game of insanity."

Hirschfeld's routine hasn't changes in years. Every day he rises at 9, has breakfast and reads the Times until 10:30. He then works in his fourth-floor studio of the upper East Side town house he shares with his wife of nearly 50 years.

After lunch, he returns to the studio from 1 to 5:30 - without the company of a dog or cat, radio or TV. "It's a rather monastic environment."

Hirschfeld, who still drives himself to the theaters downtown, has no plans to stop.

"I wouldn't know what to do with myself," he admits. "I don't golf, don't swim and i can't lie on the beach."

He likes to tell the story of his Cape Cod honeymoon 49 years ago.

"I sat out on the beach for 15 minutes and i turned to Dolly and asked if she'd mind if we went to Boston to a play. She didn't. So there we were, on a beautiful sunny day, sitting in a dark theater. It was delightful."