Carter, Thomas John Proctor
King’s College chapel : notes on its history and present condition.
London and Cambridge, Macmillan and Co 1867.
Full Description
8vo. (8) + 89 + (1)pp, actual mounted photo frontispiece, folding litho plan, errata slip. Publisher’s cloth, spine faded, but a good, clean copy. Armorial bookplate of Rev.William Alexander Comyn Macfarlane (afterwards Grieve) (1842-1917).
An unfamiliar monograph on King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, written by one of the college’s Fellows but unusual for its date in its sensibility to the aesthetic qualities of the chapel’s architecture, and incorporating a chapter at the end in which the author discusses the ethics of the restoration of historic buildings of this nature (with particular reference to the case for designing a new reredos for the chapel in an appropriately matching style). It comes as no great surprise that the author acknowledges in his preface “many hints and observations” from his friend G.G.Scott junior, and that he prints as an appendix a report of 1866 by George Gilbert Scott senior advocating the installation of a new altar and reredos. A better copy than the only other copy that we have handled, the Benjamin Webb-Howard Colvin copy listed in two past catalogues of ours but now sold.