Coffee Table Book of: Duck Decoys (Paperback)

Coffee Table Book of: Duck Decoys is a large-format coffee table book of duck decoys, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: decoys of reeds and of wood, ducks, geese, swans and shorebirds, cork, canvas and paint, the carver's tools, rigs on the water and old birds at rest on the shelf and mantel.

It opens with the decoy and its name: a mallard drake with worn paint on a long pine table, the netted pipe of a decoy pond among willows in the morning mist and a black duck beside its coiled anchor line.

Then the dabbling ducks: a mallard pair, a pintail with its long pointed tail, a wigeon with its white crown, a wood duck and a mallard carved asleep.

Then the sea ducks and mergansers: an eider on a stony shore, a surf scoter and the fan crest of a hooded merganser. Then geese, brant and swans: a Canada goose, a big white swan, a goose head carved from a bend of root and goose decoys staked in a stubble field.

Then the shorebirds on their sticks: a curlew in the sand of a beach, stick-ups on a wide beach at low tide, flat silhouettes cut from board and a knot with its rusty breast. Then the confidence decoys: a great blue heron in the shallows of a misty marsh pond and a gull on a weathered piling.

Then wood, cork and canvas: a cork-bodied decoy with a wooden head, a hollow body carved in two halves, a canvas-covered swan, glass eyes in a tin lid and a big goose built of narrow slats.

Then the carver's bench: a small hatchet and a roughly shaped body among wood chips, a drawknife among curls of shavings, a row of unpainted heads drying on a shelf and wooden patterns hung on a plank wall.

Then the shelf and mantel: a pair above a cold brick fireplace, a canvasback on a window sill with a grey bay beyond the glass and decoys in an open wall cupboard.

Short notes run through the book. They are about the decoys, how they were made and used, their names and their history rather than about the pictures: tule decoys about two thousand years old from a Nevada cave, the trapping pond called a decoy with its curved ditches netted over hoops, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 that ended market gunning for ducks, and the canvasback's scientific name, taken from the wild celery it feeds on in winter.

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

Publisher - Cedar Pine Editions

Language - English

Perfect Bound

Contributors

By author

Dimitri Smith

Published Date - 2026-10-21

ISBN - 9671456004488

Dimensions - 27.9 x 21.6 x 0.7 cm

Page Count - 98