Coffee Table Book of: Fungi (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Fungi is a large-format coffee table book in full colour: mushrooms, brackets and the other fungi of the woods, printed edge to edge in low, damp woodland light. Most pictures take a single page; the widest scenes run across a two-page spread.

It begins underground, because a mushroom is the fruit, not the whole organism. The rest is a mat of threads in the soil, and a cap that appears overnight has not so much grown as filled, pumping water into cells that were already built. Then the marks a young mushroom carries up with it: the scales where its skin tore, the ring left by a veil, and the cup at the base of the stem that stays below ground.

Then the underside, where the work is done. Gills, tubes and spines are three answers to one problem, more fertile surface, held still in moving air, and that surface is about one cell thick. Everything else in a mushroom exists to hold it up.

Then the wood: shelves stepping along a fallen trunk, the banded upper surface of a bracket, crusts laid flat under dead branches, and black lines through pale wood where two colonies met and walled each other off. A dead trunk is taken apart in sequence, each fungus altering the wood for the next. White rot breaks down lignin; brown rot leaves it and cracks the wood into cubes.

Then the forest floor, and the shapes that are not mushrooms at all, coral fungi with no cap and no underside, clubs that are nothing but fertile stalk, cups that fruit after rain and collapse within days, puffballs that use a raindrop as a bellows, and lichens, a fungus farming algae inside itself.

And it ends where the season does: caps collapsing once the water that held them up gives out, a frozen mushroom that cannot recover from the thaw, brackets left hard on bare branches after the soft fungi have gone, and at last a field of stems, because caps rot before stems do.

Short notes run through the book, most of them about how the organism works rather than what the picture shows, why spore colour is read by letting a cap stand and print, why a ring of mushrooms is the outer edge of a single colony, and why most land plants have been trading sugar with fungi at the root for around four hundred million years.

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.