Coffee Table Book of: Lanterns (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Lanterns is a large format book of lanterns, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: lanterns of paper, brass, copper, tin, glass, iron and stone, lit and unlit, set alone on plain floors, in bare rooms and out under the open sky, with the places they light and the old crafts that make and mend them.

The paper lanterns are round, tall and folding, hung on cords and set on stands, with their bamboo ribs, wooden rings and fine fibred paper seen close. Pierced brass and copper lanterns throw tiny stars of light across whitewashed rooms, a niche and an open doorway, and mosaic lamps of red, blue, amber and green glass glow in an empty room and on a terrace at night.

The working lanterns follow: a ship’s red and green side lanterns and its round anchor light, a lantern at the stern of a small boat at dawn, railway lanterns with red, green and clear globes, storm lanterns on a lakeside boulder and a snowy field, an old horn lantern, pierced tin lanterns, a carriage lamp and a miner’s safety lamp.

Then the places, empty at every hour and in every season: stone lanterns in moss gardens, in snow, among ferns and on a rock in a still pond, floating lanterns drifting on dark rivers, sky lanterns rising at nightfall, lanes hung with red and many coloured lanterns, gas street lamps in fog, snow and the first light on a quay, a lighthouse in sea mist, and a lamplighter at work far off at dusk.

The making and care of lanterns runs through it all: bamboo split into strips, paper pasted over the ribs, brass pierced with a punch, coloured glass sorted for mosaic, a granite roof shaped with the chisel, wicks trimmed, mantles hung, panes replaced and brass polished bright.

Short notes run through the book, on how lanterns are made and lit, the signals they gave at sea and on the railways, and the gardens, streets and festivals they have brightened for centuries: the holes in a pierced lantern scatter its light into patterns across the walls and floor, a sky lantern is a paper balloon lifted by hot air from a small flame beneath it, the glass room at the top of a lighthouse, where the light burns, is called the lantern, and in a miner’s safety lamp, fine wire gauze stops the flame from lighting gas in the mine.

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.