Redwood Library and Athenaeum acquires rare architecture books

NEWPORT – The Redwood Library and Athenaeum has acquired a comprehensive collection of 17th- and 18th-century British architecture books and building manuals from the antiquarian bookseller Charles Wood.
Redwood is a hybrid historic site, museum, rare book repository and the oldest continuously operating lending library in America.
Comprising 53 titles, the collection deepens the library’s significant holdings devoted to early modern architecture and design. The acquisition was made possible by a grant from the B.H. Breslauer Foundation, as well as from donations from a number of local and national benefactors.
“By virtue of what the Redwood is – the country’s oldest public Neo-Classic structure and a touchstone of the nation’s architectural patrimony – we are duty-bound to remain a center for the study of early American architecture,” said Benedict Leca, the library’s executive director. “This collection dovetails perfectly with our existing holdings, notably the Cary Collection of supremely rare 18th-century pattern books, and exemplifies our commitment to the scholarly interpretation of our own building and those of colonial Newport.”
The Redwood’s Newport Collection, used when researching Newport and Aquidneck Island, comprises more than 5,000 books and hundreds of archives and manuscripts. The Doris Duke Preservation Collection focuses on New England colonial and 19th-century architecture, with an emphasis on the preservation and restoration of both the exterior architectural structure and interior elements.
The Dorrance Hamilton Gardening Collection holds more than 500 titles of landscape architecture, classic “how-to” guides by important historic designers, such as Geoffrey Jellicoe and Lancelot “Capability” Brown, as well as a number of discerning treatments of historic world gardens. The Cynthia Cary Collection, collected over decades by Mr. and Mrs. Guy Fairfax Cary Sr., contains nearly 200 15th- to mid-19th-century English and continental pattern books of furniture, decoration and ornament.
“This outstanding collection is particularly noteworthy as it is a blend of builder’s manuals on one hand, and of illustrated, so-called gentlemen’s folios on the other,” said Leca. “It gives us a window not only on period building techniques, but also on the diffusion of architectural knowledge, its styles and fashions, by way of some real rarities.”
For more information, visit www.redwoodlibrary.org.

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