Coffee Table Book of: Butterflies (Hardcover)

Coffee Table Book of: Butterflies is a large-format coffee table book about butterflies, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two.

After a swallowtail on its title page, it begins before there is a wing at all: eggs standing in rows under a cabbage leaf, a caterpillar banded black, white and yellow along a milkweed stem, another with two false eyes on its swollen front, a jade chrysalis ringed with gold dots, and a butterfly hanging beneath its empty case, its wings still soft and crumpled.

Then it comes close to the wing: scales laid in rows like roof tiles, the clear panes of a glasswing, eyespots, a green that is not a pigment, silver spots on an orange-brown underside, a proboscis coiled like a watch spring, and the hooked antennae of a skipper.

From there it moves group by group. Swallowtails and birdwings. Monarchs packed onto fir trees for the winter, a stream of them crossing an autumn sky, and the milkweed their caterpillars feed on. A morpho flashing blue beneath the rainforest canopy, and julias drinking at the eyes of a river turtle. Blues, coppers and hairstreaks, with males crowded side by side to drink from a strip of damp mud.

Then how they live: a speckled wood holding a small pool of sunlight on the woodland floor, longwings gathered at their roost at dusk, a butterfly that closes into a dry leaf, another tilting its closed wings to the sun, a mating pair joined end to end, and two longwings from distant branches of one genus wearing almost the same pattern.

Toward the end it turns to the places they live and the weather they wait out: an alpine meadow below snowy peaks, a June hay meadow, a garden buddleia crowded with feeding butterflies, a heath of purple heather, blues roosting head-down in the dew at dawn, a lone monarch crossing a still lake, and a butterfly sheltering from summer rain beneath a nettle leaf. It closes where it began, on a single egg.

Short notes run through the book. They are about butterflies rather than about the pictures: which caterpillar is carried into an ants' nest, where it eats the grubs; how painted ladies travel between Africa and Europe every year; how the monarchs that migrate in autumn outlive a summer adult by months; and where the word chrysalis comes from.

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.

Publisher - Cedar Pine Editions

Language - English

Case Bound - PPC

Contributors

By author

Dimitri Smith

Published Date - 2026-10-21

ISBN - 9671456003504

Dimensions - 27.9 x 21.6 x 1.3 cm

Page Count - 102