Nicholson, Peter
The carpenter’s new guide: being a complete book of lines for carpentry and joinery. Treating fully of practical geometry, soffits, brick and plaister groins, niches of every description, sky-lights, lines for roofs and domes (etc) … the sixth edition, corrected and enlarged.
London, “printed for J.Taylor, at the Architectural Library, no.59, High Holborn” 1814.
Full Description
4to. vii + (1) + 87 + (5)pp, 84 engraved plates, 8pp publisher’s adverts. Contemporary full mottled calf, slightly cracking at front joint of spine (and with two small areas of surface loss on lower cover). Some offsetting from plates on facing text leaves, but a good, clean copy internally.George Atkinson’s copy.
A representative edition of this best-selling book by Peter Nicholson (1765-1844), described by Howard Colvin as “one of the leading intellects behind nineteenth-century building technology”, who used his training as a cabinet-maker as a foundation for authorship initially of the present book on constructional carpentry, first published in 1793, and then of a long series of other publications on carpentry, building and architectural drawing. The statement on the title leaf of the present edition that it is “corrected and enlarged” reflects the fact that Nicholson did continually update successive editions of this title, for the previous edition, published in 1808, had only contained 76 numbered text pages and 78 engraved plates (see BAL Cat 2290), while this edition has 87 text pages and 84 engraved plates. The 8-page “Catalogue of Modern Books on Architecture” available from the Taylor firm, bound in at the end of the volume, is closely akin to, and may indeed be identical to, a Taylor catalogue dated to 1818 by the compilers of the BAL Catalogue (their no.3273). Loosely inserted in this copy is a small printed square of paper, carrying the words “Coalway Lane Gate” and the year 1821, to which the date “June 24” has been added in ink. Coalway Lane Gate, in Penn, Staffordshire, was a toll gate on a turnpike road, and this must therefore be a receipt for a payment made for using this turnpike road in June 1821.