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, 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, …