Coffee Table Book of: Christmas Elves (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Christmas Elves is a large-format coffee table book about Christmas elves and the little folk of European folklore, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. The little folk are small crafted figures, most of felt, wool or wood; many pictures show only the things of their tales.

It opens with the Swedish tomte: carved and painted figures, a small axe on a new log wall and a doll-sized coat hung on a tub of meal.

Then the Finnish tonttu, in felt on a snowy bench and carved in birch on a windowsill. Then Viktor Rydberg’s poem Tomten: an iron padlock, a dog asleep in its kennel under the moon, a swallow’s nest under a barn beam, an empty chair by a frosted window and a tomte in a shaft of light in the barn.

Then the Wichtel: tiny doors in the skirting board, a bead and a sweet left at one, and Wichtel figures of felt. Then the Heinzelmannchen of Cologne: dried peas spilt from a tin cup, a dark blue coat laid out beside shears and chalk, a basket of folded linen and a carved house sprite carrying a loaf.

Then the Grimms’ elves and the shoemaker: a low shoemaker’s bench, leather cut for a pair of shoes, a shoe on its wooden last, a small bed set with pearls, a cradle and a gold bath.

Then an elf mill, a boulder with butter in one of its hollows; an elf carved in pale wood, an old painted dwarf and a garden gnome among dry ferns in the snow. Then Iceland: a turf house under snow, a Yule Lad in a grey hooded tunic and a gully between dark rocks.

Then the Christmas elf: in green felt with a red scarf, among presents wrapped in red and green, dressed in brown fur, and beside a little wooden wagon; a carved black cat beside dark pansies, brushes of feathery grass with pots of bright paint, and a felt nisse dressed all in red.

Then toys: a hobby horse, an old kaleidoscope, a worn teddy bear, an angel marionette, tin soldiers and a painted jack-in-the-box.

Short notes run through the book. They are about the little folk, their names, tales and customs, rather than about the pictures: when a Finnish home tonttu was believed to come into a new house, who alone is awake at midnight in Rydberg’s poem, how a tailor in Kopisch’s ballad found the mayor’s coat made while he slept, and who introduced the gnome.

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.