This is the second in a series of posts from the librarian about select volumes in the Richard J. Scheuer collection. Today we are presenting:
A cyclopædia of works of architecture in Italy, Greece, and the Levant / edited by William P. P. Longfellow. New York : C. Scribner’s Sons, 1895. Call number: NA31.L6 1895
This beautiful tome, with its gold embossed leather binding and gilded edges, is a compilation of entries on the architecture in Italy, Greece and the Levant. It was published in 1895 as a limited edition: only 500 copies were printed, of which we have copy no. 167. In its 546 pages, there are hundreds of detailed illustrations, 12 of which are intricate photogravure plates.
In the editor’s preface, he writes that:
“In two important instances special effort has been made to show what has heretofore been neglected: – the drawing of the rear of St. Peter’s, carefully constructed from photographs and measured plans, gives the church as it would appear if the houses that crowd about its lower parts were pulled away, and shows it therefore as Michael Angelo intended it to appear, but as it is never seen. The photogravure of the interior of Sta. Sofia was prepared because the composite photographs that are in circulation show this noble interior with broken lines and distorted proportion, and the only published drawings which give an adequate impression of it, those of Fossati, are unsuited for reproduction.”
The Albright Library’s copy has been in the collection since 1943.
