Coffee Table Book of: Halloween (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Halloween is a large-format coffee table book about Halloween, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. It shows the season as still life and landscape, from the pumpkin patch to the full moon over the fields.

It opens in the pumpkin patch: ripe pumpkins on their withering vines, a golden pumpkin flower beaded with dew, a heap of heirloom pumpkins on straw, and a giant pumpkin creased under its own weight beside a small hay bale. Then the old lanterns: a lone bonfire on a bare hilltop, a carved turnip lantern on a stone wall, and pale lights hovering over a dark marsh.

Then carving: a pumpkin with its lid lifted and its inside scraped clean, and a freshly carved face with a wide, toothy grin. Then the jack-o’-lanterns: one glowing on fallen leaves, a small group on a dry-stone wall, a white pumpkin lantern on a mossy step, one carved with stars and crescent moons, a tall pyramid of glowing faces, and one dusted with early snow.

Then porches and doorsteps: a farmhouse porch with corn stalks and chrysanthemums, a wreath of dried oak leaves on a dark green door, and worn stone steps lit by lanterns. Then old houses at dusk: a Victorian house with a round corner tower, a grey Gothic Revival cottage, a railed platform on a rooftop above the sea, and a clapboard house alone in a field of golden grass.

Then the Halloween table: caramel apples, glossy red candy apples, a glass bowl of candy corn, a pitcher of cloudy apple cider, a barmbrack with a gold ring beside the slice, and soul cakes marked with crosses. Then fields and scarecrows: corn shocks standing in rows on the stubble, a scarecrow with a crow on its arm, and a red covered bridge among scarlet maples.

Then autumn woods and churchyards: a leaf-strewn path among grey beeches, bright orange wild mushrooms, brambles heavy with the last blackberries, a small stone church in mist, a roofed lychgate, and candles glowing on old graves.

Short notes run through the book. They are about Halloween and the season rather than about the pictures: how the Halloween lantern came to North America, how a black cat’s coat can rust in the sun, which old Japanese chronicle tells of a scarecrow god who cannot walk but knows everything, and where moonlight really comes from.

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.