UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Book Jacket: American Architects and Their Books to 1848, edited by K. Hafertepe and J. O'Gorman

Edited by Kenneth Hafertepe and James F. O'Gorman

Examines the use of books by architects in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America

Since the Renaissance, books and drawings have been a primary means of communication among architects and their colleagues and clients. In this volume, twelve historians explore the use of books by architects in America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth 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 this 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.

"The precedents communicated by books are an 'integral part of the study of the history of buildings,' declares this volume. The editors' introduction comments on and gives framework for 12 independent essays by distinguished architectural historians. This work is indispensable for understanding the relationship between books and architecture."

Choice
The scholarship in American Architects and Their Books is sound and up to date. The contributors are leaders in the field and promising younger historians. Because this is the first full-scale examination of the topic, the book will be welcomed by architectural historians, students of reading and the history of the book, and historians of collecting as well as collectors themselves."

Eleanor McD. Thompson, The Winterthur Library
"American Architects and Their Books is a major contribution to the field of American architectural and cultural history."

Jack Quinan, SUNY, Buffalo

Formerly director of academic programs at Historic Deerfield, Inc., Kenneth Hafertepe is assistant professor of museum studies at Baylor University.

James F. O'Gorman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of the History of American Art at Wellesley College.

Architectural History / American History
248 pp., 81 illus.
$35.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-282-8
2001

A volume in the series Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

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