Coffee Table Book of: Walks of Wonder (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Walks of Wonder is a large-format coffee table book about walking, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. It follows the walk from the sea to the town: promenades and piers, boardwalks and cliff paths, avenues of trees, garden paths, old lanes and footbridges.

It opens by the sea: a pale stone promenade curving along a calm bay, a promenade lined with tall date palms, a pavement laid in waves of black and white stone, and a long wooden pier on slender iron legs. Then boardwalks: over a dune through marram grass, through a golden reed marsh, among bald cypresses in a still swamp, and across a moorland bog.

Then avenues of trees: lindens meeting overhead in a high green vault, old beeches with twisting grey trunks, live oaks hung with long grey moss, and a white gravel road lined with dark cypresses. Then avenues in blossom and autumn leaf: cherry trees in pale pink blossom, ginkgos in butter-yellow leaf, and jacarandas in purple-blue bloom.

Then tunnels and garden paths: a tunnel of hanging yellow laburnum, another of lilac wisteria, iron arches covered in pink roses, a grass walk between deep summer borders, a herringbone brick path between low box hedges, a gravel path edged with lavender, and a mown path through a meadow of daisies and buttercups.

Then old-town lanes: a stepped lane of whitewashed houses with magenta bougainvillea, honey-coloured stone cottages, half-timbered houses jutting over steep cobbles, and wet cobbles shining under lit wall lanterns.

Toward the end, footbridges: a stone bridge with a single high arch over a rocky stream, granite slabs laid across a moorland river, an arch that makes a full circle with its reflection, a long bridge of many low arches, a red-lacquered bridge among scarlet maples, a rope bridge slung across a misty gorge, and a small wooden bridge between carpets of bluebells.

Short notes run through the book. They are about walking and the places made for it rather than about the pictures: how tall the common reed can grow, why Lombardy poplars are all clones, how the silk makers of Lyon carried their cloth through the city under cover, and how the wedge-shaped stones of an arch carry its weight.

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.