Coffee Table Book of: Eggs (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Eggs is a large-format coffee table book about eggs, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. Most are birds’ eggs, set as still lifes on a plain ground.

It begins with shape: a nearly round owl’s egg, the long, narrow egg of a swift, the plain oval of a goose egg, pear-shaped lapwing eggs fitted points together in a nest of dry grass, and a row of eggs running from almost round to long and sharply pointed.

Then colour, and the marks laid over it: eggs graded from white through blue and olive to red-brown, clear blue-green robin’s eggs, a sky-blue thrush egg with a few black spots, guillemot eggs in many colours and markings, a yellowhammer’s egg scribbled with fine dark lines, an osprey’s boldly blotched with red-brown, and two marbled nightjar eggs lying on dry leaves.

Then the great and the small: an ostrich egg and the huge, weathered egg of the extinct elephant bird, each with an ordinary hen’s egg beside it, two tiny hummingbird eggs in a cup of plant down and lichen, and the eggs of the ostrich, emu, cassowary and rhea side by side. Then nests: a cuckoo’s egg in a reed warbler’s nest, eider eggs in a deep bed of down, penguin eggs on a nest of small stones, a flamingo’s egg on top of a tall cone of dried mud, and a wood pigeon’s flimsy platform of twigs.

Then the shore and the farmyard: a gannet’s egg on a mound of dried seaweed, tern eggs among pale shingle, a swan’s clutch in a wide mound of reeds, a row of hen’s eggs from white and cream through brown and chocolate to pale blue and olive green, and duck eggs shading from charcoal black to off-white.

Toward the end it goes beyond the birds: sea turtle eggs heaped in pale sand, alligator eggs in a mound of rotting leaves, two gecko eggs stuck to a piece of bark, the soft eggs of a platypus, and a fossil clutch of dinosaur eggs set in a ring in reddish rock.

Short notes run through the book. They are about the eggs and the animals that lay them rather than about the pictures: where the word oval comes from, which living bird lays the largest egg, why a blue hen’s egg is blue right through its shell, and what the empty egg cases of skates are called when they wash up on beaches.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.