Coffee Table Book of: Lighthouses (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Lighthouses is a large-format coffee table book about lighthouses, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. Most show a tower on its coast, from sea rock to harbour pier, by day and by night; others go up into the lantern and inside the tower.

It opens with towers of stone and brick: a squat granite tower on a sea-washed rock, a slender tower of bare red brick, twin white towers well apart on one headland, and an old beacon tower with an iron fire basket on top.

Then the daymarks: red and white bands above the marram grass of the dunes, a red and white spiral, black and white checks on a low rocky islet, and a solid stone cone with no lantern at all.

Then inside the tower: a stone spiral stair seen from below, a bronze door set high in a granite wall, a round room with curved wooden bunks, and the lamplit watch room. Then the buildings around it: whitewashed cottages in a walled yard, a fog signal house with two great black horns, a plain bronze fog bell, and stone landing steps cut into the rock.

Then rocks, islands and harbours: a lighthouse on a tidal island at the end of a causeway of rock and seaweed, low, rounded pink granite islands, a white tower on black volcanic rock, a red lighthouse at the end of a long stone breakwater, and a pier light on a frozen lake, thick with ice.

Then dusk and night: a lit lamp under a sky fading from rose to deep blue, two long pale beams through thin sea mist, a silver path of moonlight across a calm sea, and green curtains of the northern lights.

Toward the end, the lighthouse year: pink thrift on a cliff top, a headland purple with heather, a bare island under a low gold sun on the sea horizon, a flock of small birds passing low over a tower on a headland of rust-brown bracken, a lighthouse and its cottages under fresh snow, and sea smoke rising from dark open water.

Short notes run through the book. They are about lighthouses and their coasts rather than about the pictures: why many towers are painted in bands, stripes or checks, why towers on low, flat coasts were built so tall, why the bunks in a sea-rock lighthouse were built curved, and how the keepers kept the lamp burning from sunset to sunrise, every night of the year.

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