Reviews of Books

American Architects and Their Books to 1848 is a collection of a dozen essays by a number of prominent scholars that grew out of a 1997 conference marking the bicentennial of Asher Benjamin's The Country Builder's Assistant (Greenfield, Mass., 1797), the first American-authored book on architecture published in the United States. That work, which became a standard craftsman's guide in the nineteenth century, offered a native version of a genre that sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century and, according to co-editors Kenneth Hafertepe and James F. O'Gorman, formed the primary means of communicating ideas among architects, builders, and their clients in early America. Through this medium, the rules and details of classical architecture were transmitted from Europe to colonial America and then across the nation through a series of diverse publications. From the 1740s, when a number of inexpensive English builder's books began to circulate in the colonies, to the 1840s, when design portfolios promoting a picturesque aesthetic first appeared, Americans turned to books to keep abreast of architectural fashion.	1
Opening essays by Abbott Lowell Cummings and Bennie Brown catalogue the presence of building books in the libraries of the Chesapeake gentry, the workshops of New England artisans, and above all in the hands of those who aspired to make architecture a profession in the new republic. As Brown's thorough study of estate inventories and newspaper advertisements in Virginia reveals, costly English, French, and Italian architectural books, handsomely bound and generously illustrated with fine line engravings, could be found in the homes of a number of planters in the late colonial period, but few owners mined these treatises as guides for the purpose of building. Apart from a few notable exceptions such as Thomas Jefferson, the architectural education gained through imported books of designs and topography more closely resembled antiquarian scholarship than practical application. It was simply one part of the curriculum of a gentleman's classical education.	2
Subsequent essays concentrate on the use made of architecture books by builders and architects in the first four decades of the nineteenth century when new styles superseded one another with ever-increasing frequency. The English books filled with neoclassical detailing that flooded the American market in the decades following the Revolution were gradually supplanted by ones written by American builders, who extolled the virtues of Grecian architecture and promoted American examples worthy of emulation. Many craftsmen in the early republic, like their colonial predecessors, received their only formal education in the classical orders by studying these inexpensive builder's manuals. Most books illustrated the five ancient orders, explicated the grammar of classical design, contained useful tips on mensuration and the laying of difficult features such as stairs, and provided designs of prominent show elements such as mantels and frontispieces. As Hafertepe demonstrates, Benjamin's Country Builder's Assistant replicated the format and borrowed some of the plates found in these English builder's books. Except for the publication of an adaptation of a Charles Bulfinch design for a meetinghouse, the principal novelty of this book by a Massachusetts carpenter was the place of publication, not the content.	. . .