American Architects and Their Books to 1848

Since the Renaissance, books and drawings have been a primary means of communication among architects and their colleagues and clients. In this volume, 12 historians explore the use of books by architects in America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a period when the profession of architecture was first emerging in the United States. As architects separated themselves from amateur and gentlemen designers on the one hand and masons and carpenters on the other, members of the profession were distinguished by their ability to draw and their possession of a common body of learning gleaned from printed sources. Clients and patrons expected architects to derive their designs from precedents communicated in books. These publications reproduced the work of European masters and, eventually, Anglo-American examples as well. The essays in the volume range from studies of architectural publications available in the colonies, to the appearance of American architectural incunabula, to the revolution in architectural publishing that occurred in the 1830s and 1840s. In addition to the editors, contributors include Sarah Allaback, Bennie Brown, Jeffrey A. Cohen, Abbott Lowell Cummings, Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Michael J. Lewis, Martha J. McNamara, Damie Stillman, Richard Guy Wilson and Charles B. Wood III.