The title of the book already says a lot about the content. “Handy Architecture” is the title and already describes that this book explains all the basic things that are needed for architecture.
First, the book covers definitions of geometric measurements of planes, surfaces, and buildings. Then it speaks about triangles, quadrilaterals, and polygonal figures. It also talks about solids, curves, and planar planes. After that Bullet Pierre describes how to measure the areas of rectangles, triangles, polygons and irregular polygons, rhombuses, trapezoids, circles, parts of circles, ellipses, and parabolic surfaces. He also explains how to calculate the surface area of various geometric shapes and finally the volumes. After that, the book explains how the calculations also work with changes in length.
Now it comes to the buildings, and it is explained, for example, how the chimney is constructed. This becomes so detailed until it is even said how it must be constructed to be able, to bake bread and patisserie in it.
In the book everything is discussed, for example: the floor, the skylights, the stairs, the sealants and bricks, the walls, the moulures, and the lubricants. All of these things are discussed in terms of measurement and construction.
So, you can see the book is full of really all the relevant things an architect needs to design and build a house. Sometimes the things described are accompanied with drawings or explanatory illustrations.
The book is a manual in terms of size. It has a lot of pages (700), which makes the table of contents even more important. This makes it possible to look up exactly what is needed at the moment. If we look more closely we can also find some drawings of flowers in the book and on the outside it is a very beautiful cover. This could be interpretated that the book was very valuable.
With this book Pierre Bullet certainly wanted to make a manual that could solve problems of structures by his calculations. The calculations that he recorded here were certainly very useful for many contemporary architects. The book thus served for sure as a good reference.