Architectural Printed Works

Medium: Printed

Number of items: 3,000 items.

Among the Library’s large collection of historic architectural surveys and treatises the following works are particularly noteworthy:

• At least nine editions of Vitruvius’s De Architectura, the earliest printed in Rome by Georg Herolt in 1486;
• Sebastiano Serlio’s Regole Generali di Architettura (Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1540);
• Leon Battista Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria (Florence: Nicolaus Laurentii, 1485) and its Italian translation, I Dieci Libri de l’Architettura (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1546);
• Andrea Palladio’s I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (Venice: Dominico de' Franceschi, 1570);
• Jan Vredeman de Vries’s Variae Architecturae Formae (Antwerp: Théodore Galle, 1601);
• Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus; or, The British Architect ([London]: The author, 1715-17);
• Johannes Kip’s Nouveau Théâtre de la Grande Bretagne (London: Joseph Smith, 1724) and Supplement (London: J. Groenewegen & N. Prevost, 1728);
• Stephen Wren’s Parentalia; or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens (London: T. Osborn & R. Dodsley, 1750), a study of the work of his grandfather Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723);
• Robert Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia ([London]: The author, 1764);
• Sir John Soane’s Designs in Architecture (London: I. Taylor, 1778) and Plans, Elevations and Sections of Buildings Executed in the Counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Yorkshire… (London: Taylor, 1788);
• Humphry Repton’s Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1794), Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (London: J. Taylor, 1803), and facsimiles of several of his 'Red Books';
• Joseph Nash’s The Mansions of England ([London]: T. McLean, 1839-49).

There are also works which are of interest for studies of landscape history, land use, gardens of the Renaissance and later periods, the development of cities and town planning, public health and sanitation, civic and religious rituals, sepulchral inscriptions and the architecture of death, and concepts of space.

See also:

• Nigel Temple Book Collection

Further information:

• Recorded in Library Search.
• H. Guppy and G. Vine, A Classified Catalogue of the Works on Architecture and the Allied Arts in the Principal Libraries of Manchester and Salford (Manchester: University Press, 1909).

Location:

• The John Rylands Library, Deansgate  [Map]
• Find out how to use the reading rooms in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library
• The University of Manchester Main Library, Oxford Rd  [Map]
• Find out how to use the reading room in the Main Library