{"product_id":"coffee-table-book-of-butterflies-hardcover","title":"Coffee Table Book of: Butterflies (Hardcover)","description":"\u003cp\u003eCoffee 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThen 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThen 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eToward 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShort 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePrinted 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cedar Pine Editions","offers":[{"title":"Case Bound - PPC","offer_id":68146976358704,"sku":"9671456003504","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0262\/2357\/5085\/files\/9671456003504.jpg?v=1792609419","url":"https:\/\/www.thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk\/products\/coffee-table-book-of-butterflies-hardcover","provider":"The Great British Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}