Coffee Table Book of: Nutcrackers (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Nutcrackers is a large-format coffee table book about the nutcracker and its companions, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. It shows the wooden Christmas of the Ore Mountains as still life, from the lathe and the painter’s bench to the windowsill.

It opens with the figures: a tall king in a red coat with a gold crown and a white fur beard, a hussar in a black fur cap and a blue jacket laced with gold cord, a forester holding a small turned fir tree, a knight in silver-grey armour and a king in a purple robe dotted with gold stars.

Then the workshop: an old wood-turning lathe in a whitewashed room, a half-turned body held in the lathe, an old timber mill with a water wheel hung with icicles, and the parts of an unpainted nutcracker laid out in rows. Then the painter’s bench: a figure half painted red with its face still bare wood, and rows of painted smokers on a long board.

Then incense smokers: a pipe smoker with a long wooden pipe, a smoker opened in two with its cone on a little metal plate, and a peddler with a tray of tiny turned wares.

Then candle arches: an old arch of black forged iron with a cut-out sun, moon and stars, an arch half sawn on a fretsaw table and a triangular arch with a forest and a deer.

Then lanterns and the Christmas mountain: a landscape of moss and roots on a corner shelf with tiny houses, a white church and a little mine, and a lantern of fretsawn wood glowing red, orange and green. Then shelves and windowsills: an old painted corner shelf of figures, and an old king with faded paint and a chipped crown.

Toward the end, snow light and candlelight: a smoker on a low table in a lamplit parlour, a miner’s oil lamp just put out, a small hussar in the snow on a garden wall, and a bare sill with a faint ring in the dust and one nutcracker left standing.

Short notes run through the book. They are about the figures, how they are made and the customs of the Ore Mountains, rather than about the pictures: what incense cones are made of, what the arms, feet and faces of the first wooden smokers were modelled from, which way a candle pyramid traditionally turns, and since when turned wooden angels have carried candles.

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.