Bullet, (Pierre)
Architecture pratique, qui comprend la construction générale & particulière des bâtimens… avec une explication et une conférence de trente-six articles de la coutume de Paris sur le titre des servitudes & rapports qui concernent les bâtimens, & de l’Ordonnance de 1673. Edition nouvelle, revue & corrigé avec soin: considérablement augmentée… par M***, Architecte, ancien Inspecteur-Toiseur de Bâtiment.
Paris, Delalain 1774.
Full Description
8vo. xxxii + 608pp, engraved frontispiece, (12 ex 13) engraved plates, folding printed table (lacking folding engraved plate which should follow p.263). Contemporary full calf, gilt spine, the spine worn and chipped at head and foot, and cracked at hinges (but still soundly bound). Late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century ownership inscription of “Perrin”on title leaf, pasted over an earlier ownership inscription of Joseph (?) Richard, 1787.
A late eighteenth-century edition of this well-known text book on the costing of building work by the Parisian architect Pierre Bullet (1639-1716), first published in 1691. The extensive revisions incorporated in this edition had first been made in an edition of 1755 by the Parisian architect Cosme-Louis Briard-Descoutures, prepared by him, remarkably enough, while serving a sentence in the Bastille for operating a clandestine printing press. The only edition of this title in the British Architectural Library is one of 1732 (BAL Cat 491), in the note to which the authorship of the revisions made to these later editions is wrongly attributed to two separate Italian architects, as a result of a complete misunderstanding by the compilers of the BAL Catalogue of a footnote in Comolli’s Bibliografia Storico-Critica dell’Architettura. Our present copy lacks one plate and is priced accordingly.