The three books of Architectura civil recta y obliqua that were given to me by the HDB library for this task were of a newer edition and so I was also able to borrow them. They therefore don’t have a very old style about them in terms of paper condition and book cover, only the text’s font and illustrations (and obviously knowledge of the writer and writing time) give the reader the feeling of making contact with something ancient.
Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz’s literary work Architectura civil recta y obliqua consists of three volumes, of which the first one features a table of numbers to ease mathematics and geometrics in architecture and the last one only includes illustrations. All of them are divided into Partes and subdivided into Articulos, Reglas, Principios, Definicions and Proposicions. In the version I was given, each of these volumes had an own book, in the original there is only one including all three.
The main subject of the book, as the title suggests, is straight and oblique architecture. This is covered by looking deeper into and strengthening the connections between geometry and architecture.
Talking numbers, the three volumes all measure 365x220x34mm, which makes them Folio sized in tradional standard book sizes. In total, the books consist of 925 pages (298, 298 and 329) and 167 illustrations.
