With early modern architecture one of the Library’s five key Special Collections areas, the Redwood aims to be an indispensable resource for researchers, historians and restoration architects. This two-leaf pamphlet in its original blue wrappers gives the wholesale pricing in dollars & cents of lumber in Boston for the year 1805, extremely valuable historical information logically applicable to any contemporary construction in neighboring Rhode Island. It was found tucked–no doubt there since 1805–inside a rare carpenter’s ‘Rules of Work’ booklet also purchased. It is of supreme rarity, given that this type of workaday ephemera used by artisans almost never survives: indeed, it is nowhere listed in the OCLC/Worldcat and completely unrecorded in the critical literature on early American architecture.
