[R] Newbie: Barchart Gray with White Grid?

[Tom Hopper]

Hello,

I'm just getting in to R, been reading manuals (thanks to all who 
provided pointers to good docs!), and messing with different commands. 
I'd appreciate a little help with this exploration, and I hope that my 
question is relatively easy to answer (probably, there's a simple way 
to do what I'm working toward).

R's statistical functions are coming along easily enough, but graphics 
seem to be a little tougher for me, probably because I'm used to 
working in SigmaPlot. As an exercise, I tried to create a gray bar 
chart with white grid overlay, like the one on page 128 of Tufte's 
"Visual Display of Quantitative Information." I  figure this would 
cover a lot of the basic techniques that I'll need for "real" work. I 
got as far as having a gray bar chart (I was working within hist(), 
mostly) with white borders, white (on white background) axes, white 
grid *under* the bars, and both x- and y-axis labels (both the numeric 
or categorical label, and the axis titles...I don't quite remember the 
correct terms in R).

I wasn't able to find a way to display only the gridlines parallel to 
the x-axis, or to overlay that grid on top of the bars, or to turn off 
the numeric labels on the x-axis without touching the y-axis, or to 
show the x-axis as a gray line without showing the y-axis.

Has anyone done this? How?

Thank you,

Tom