E M Hatt Introduction (2 results)

Hardcover, unpaginated. Condition: Acceptable. Dust Jacket Condition: Acceptable. Leslie Wood (illustrator). First Edition. First Edition. Yellow pictorial cloth boards. Bowing to front board. Rubbing and soiling to boards. Significant age wear and foxing to text block. paste-downs, endpapers and throughout text. Split in binding between back past-down and endpaper. Foxing to paste-downs, endpapers and throughout text. Significant handling and shelf wear to dust jacket. Creasing, scuffing and chipping to dust jacket. Foxing, soiling and age wear to dust jacket. Dust jacket housed in mylar protective sleeve.

Hardcover. Condition: Very good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. First Printing thus [Stated]. The format is approximately 9.5 inches by 12.50 inches. 111, [1] pages. Illustrations. Translator's Notes. Books by J. F. Steinbruber, Notes. The dust jacket is in a plastic sleeve. This was first published in a Limited Edition by The Merrion Press, London, in 1972. A reprint of Steingruber's 4th and final book. An imaginative and ingenuous work offering plans for buildings based on the Roman alphabet. Born in 1702 and raised in Bavaria in a wealthy family of building contractors, German architect and agricultural inspector Johann David Steingruber learned masonry and architectural drawing from his father and uncle. He went from being a simple mason to a designer at the court of Marquis Christian Friedrich Charles Alexander of Brandenburg-Ansbach. Over the years he designed and directed work on a large number of buildings, including churches, schools, hospitals, town halls and other institutional buildings, as well as houses. Regarded as the founder of the Markgrafenstil -a style typical of many churches built in the 1700s, especially in Protestant areas of the Brandenburg region, characterized by a simple, typically Calvinist style-, Steingruber is best known for the fictional intricate illustrations of his 1773 Architectural Alphabet, in which he converted the alphabet into plans for a series of eccentric baroque buildings. Originally published in installments at Steingruber's own expense, the volume opens with its gloriously long title in an "arch of contents", the columns inscribed with thumbnail images of the letter buildings to come. Although the title page lists 1773 as the publication date, the last installment came in March 1774. In his lifetime, Steingruber published three other works, illustrated and described toward the end of this facsimile, but Architectonisches Alphabeth became his most famous. Steingruber dedicated his Architectural Alphabet to Christian Friedrich Carl Alexander, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, and his first wife Frederica Carolina. Steingruber had to be satisfied with his payment as an appointee court and public surveyor, and later principal architect of the board of works even though he went to the trouble of making sure that his employers' monograms and their associated buildings appeared in the span above the roman arch. There was not much chance of these letter-shaped edifices' being built. Nevertheless, Steingruber adds matter-of-fact descriptions to his elevations and plans, calling out heating, kitchen, toilet and servants' arrangements as if conferring with a prospective client ready to commission one of these typographic palaces. Who would not want a serif with a view? Or conduct guests on a tour of the bowl, capline, crossbar, stem, stroke and tail of the property?