Coffee Table Book of: Goats (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Goats is a large format book of goats, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: dairy, meat and fibre goats, young goats at play, feral goats on wild coasts and hills, ibex and markhor in the high mountains, faces, horns, beards and hooves seen close, milk, cheese and fleece, and the pastures, barns, gorges and meadows where goats live, at many hours and in every season.

Dairy does stand in frosty fields at sunrise and rest in buttercup meadows: a lop eared doe with long hanging ears and an arched nose, large white does grazing a green hillside in soft rain, a tawny doe with black legs and a dark stripe down her back, a light brown doe with white face stripes at the edge of a beech wood in autumn, and a small patched dairy goat on an old tree stump in an orchard in blossom.

Boer goats, bred for meat, walk dry golden grass at sunset with their red brown heads and white bodies. Angora goats stand in summer pastures and light snow in long lustrous curls of mohair, and cashmere goats wait on snowy hillsides in their thick winter coats and loosen their soft down in spring.

Young goats leap from a fallen trunk, spring straight up in a spring meadow, touch foreheads on a primrose bank and sleep curled together in straw.

Seen close are a goat’s level oblong pupil, a beard and wattles, nimble lips at a bramble leaf, a split hoof on bare rock and the knobbed horns of an ibex. The places stand empty at dawn, noon and dusk, in mist, fog, frost and snow: a dry hill pasture, an old stone barn deep in straw, a high summer meadow, an orchard in blossom, a rocky gorge, walled fields in fog, a black tent of woven goat hair and a snowy mountain slope under the first stars.

Short notes run through the book, on how goats feed, climb and raise their young, the milk, cheese and fibre they give, and the wild goats of the high mountains: goats thrive on rough, stony ground where cattle would find too little to eat, young goats leap, twist and climb at play from their first days of life, goats rise on their hind legs to reach leaves high on a bush or tree, and young goats often spring straight up with all four hooves off the ground at once.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.