The Redwood’s aim to be a comprehensive resource for researchers in architectural history, colonial to Gilded Age, involves systematic acquisition of period materials that can inform both scholars and craftsmen, and help us–like they did for their original 19th-c. audiences–better appreciate Newport’s many remarkable historic structures.
Some early American architectural books as this new purchase produced in 1875 by Bicknell & Comstock, specialist architecture publishers, are essentially textless pattern books for architect and client bordering on the trade catalog–and yet not without a lineage to much earlier 18th-c. engraved architectural pattern books in the Redwood Special Collections. Bicknell books were by the 1870s readily employing conventional mechanized printed images—here of structures in NY state:”16 plans, elevations and views of stables, several outbuildings and fences, and over one-hundred miscellaneous details; also summer houses, sea side cottages, boat houses..”
The Redwood’s volume is an exceptional survivor for its ‘like new’ condition–of what is a rare book: Henry-Russell Hitchcock, in his definitive American Architectural Books (156), locates only two copies.
