July 12, 1987

LEAD: AFTER five years of resistance, the county's hotel industry is preparing to deal with a room surtax. But industry leaders have not abandoned the hope that they can have a say in what form the new tax will take, and they would also like to secure some of the additional revenue for uses that help the industry.

LEAD: WHILE NEW YORK THEA-TERGOERS were busy decrying the Anglicization of Broadway this spring, the London theater flew into a panic over the specter of ruthless Broadway-style economics in the West End. For the first time since World War II, four neighboring straight-play houses on Shaftesbury Avenue were bereft of tenants.

LEAD: Given the growing concern - and confusion - over the best way to deal with the presence of asbestos in some 733,000 buildings nationwide, a publication put out by the National Institute of Building Sciences, called ''Model Guide Specifications: Asbestos Abatement in Buildings,'' might offer some assistance.

LEAD: READERS of the essays in The Book Review have been recently familiarized, whether they like it or not, with the old debate on whether less is, in fact, more. Like so much literary debate, it is most interesting for what it deflects. That is to say, it is very American, and very contemporary, to see this as an esthetic issue, refusing to consider literature as taking place in a larger social and cultural framework, of literature having reference at all.

LEAD: WHEN Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North leaves the witness table this week, his place will be taken by Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter, the former national security adviser and the man Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, a Reagan loyalist but one of the Iran-contra hearings' toughest questioners, expects to be ''by far the most single important witness.