Coffee Table Book of: Speed Skating (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Speed Skating is a large format book of speed skating, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: long blades and low boots, frozen canals, wild lakes and sea bays, the ice made and cared for, the old skates of bone, wood and iron, and a few skaters seen far off in plain dark clothing.

The kit is laid out plain: long track skates, a clap skate, a short track skate with its high stiff boot, a hard shell helmet, racing gloves, shin guards and knee pads, hard blade guards and soft cloth covers, a white and a red armband, an inline racing skate, and the touring kit of natural ice: a spiked ice pole, ice claws, a throw rope, a waterproof bag and woollen mittens.

The making and care follow a flat sharpening stone and an old whetstone, a wooden skate half made beside its forged blade, steel pipes laid for a rink floor, ice flooded by hose at night and snow pushed from a lake. The past runs from bone skates and a spiked pushing pole to wooden skates with curled iron blades and long leather straps, old racing skates on steel tubes, a brass bell for the last lap and an old brick rink hall.

Then the places, empty at every hour and in every season: black ice on a mountain lake, canals between willows, under a stone bridge and through a small town at night, a ditch by a windmill, flooded meadows at sunset, rivers at noon and under the full moon, coves, reeds, springs and pressure ridges, hoar frost, rime, slush and thaw, a frozen sea bay and the northern lights, with a few small skaters far off, touring alone, racing in a pair and riding in a line against the wind, and training in summer on a bike and on inline skates.

Short notes run through the book, on the skates and how they are made and cared for, natural ice and how it forms, and the history of racing on ice: a long track skate has a low boot and a long, thin, flat blade that reaches well past the toe, on long straight stretches, skaters often fold their arms behind the back to save effort, outdoor ice is built up in thin floods of water, each left to freeze hard before the next, and strong winds can push lake ice ashore and pile it into jagged heaps along the beach.

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