Coffee Table Book of: Bears (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Bears is a large format book of bears, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: bears fishing, digging, grazing, climbing, swimming and sleeping, mothers with their cubs, faces, paws and fur seen close, tracks, claw scars and dens, and the rivers, coasts, forests, mountains and sea ice where bears live, at many hours and in every season.

The salmon runs bring grizzlies and brown bears down to the rivers: a bear waits at the lip of a low falls as a red salmon leaps toward its jaws, another stands in a shallow river at sunrise with a salmon in its jaws, red salmon hold still over clean gravel, and the rivers lie empty in morning mist and at dusk.

Black bears wade forest streams, strip ripe blueberries with their lips, tear open rotten logs for grubs, graze dandelions in a cinnamon brown coat, stand on a granite rock at a misty lake and cross a mountain meadow of yellow lilies, while a cub climbs a tall pine with its mother below and a bear sleeps out the winter under the roots of a fallen tree.

Polar bears walk the frozen sea at dusk and through blowing snow, swim the calm open sea, wait beside a breathing hole for a seal, ride a drifting floe under a glowing summer sky near midnight and lie among red autumn leaves waiting for the ice to return, while a mother stands at the mouth of her snow den with her cub in the spring sun.

Short notes run through the book, on how bears fish, dig, climb and swim, how they raise their cubs and pass the winter in their dens, and the eight kinds of bear alive today: a bear stands on its hind legs to see and smell farther, not to attack, a polar bear swims with its big front paws, steering with its hind legs, and can swim for days, the pale markings on a spectacled bear’s face differ from bear to bear, like a fingerprint, and the sun bear is named for the golden patch on its chest, said to look like a rising sun.

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.