Coffee Table Book of: Advent (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Advent is a large-format coffee table book that counts down to Christmas, a few pictures for each day from 1 to 25 December, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. The days follow their customs where they have one, and the season’s work and weather where they do not.

It opens on 1 December with calendars: a wooden house of small closed doors and chalk strokes on an old door. Then the makings of an Advent wreath, red apples joined into a little pyramid and a barrow of fir boughs in the snow; holly and ivy; Saint Barbara’s wheat sprouting in saucers on the 4th; a carved Krampus mask with curling horns and a sack of parcels on a snowy doorstep on the 5th; a bishop’s red mitre and crozier on the 6th; and a robin on a spade handle in the snow.

Then frost ferns on a window pane and an onion sliced and salted; a star pinata and a blue door in a whitewashed wall at dusk; a friction drum, a basket of nuts and figs on a doorstep and a carol singers’ lantern; a paper lantern on a church pew and a village church at first light, its door open on candlelight; paper, ribbon and crackers; a snow globe, skates of bone and a carved biscuit mould; and the low sun of the 21st over a snowy field.

Toward the end, old skates on a jetty post above a frozen lake and a kicksled on the ice, radishes carved into flowers, birds and little houses, and a whisk of leafy twigs on a log wall. Then Christmas Eve: a guitar on a chair in an empty church, a bell in a snowy belfry at dusk and little candles afloat in walnut shells. And Christmas morning: untrodden snow in a pink sunrise, opened presents on a rug, a new sledge with a red bow and the tio with a herring, garlic and an onion.

Short notes run through the book. They are about the days and their customs, rather than about the pictures: when wheat is sown in saucers on Saint Barbara’s Day, what Lucia’s white dress, red sash and crown stand for, what a Christmas cracker traditionally holds, and what Norway’s church bells ring in on Christmas Eve.

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