Architectura, Jan Vredeman de Vries. Reprint 1973.
In Architectura, the Belgian author, painter and architect Jan Vredeman de Vries focusses on the five antique orders as originally described by the roman architect Vitruvius. He dedicates a full chapter to each of the orders and provides further suggestions and examples as how the orders can be used and incorporated in different forms of construction and architecture.
The book I examined was a reprint of the Georg Olms publishing house from 1973. It starts with an empty cover sheet, followed by a sheet simply displaying the title and author of the book. The next two pages are the frontispieces – one added in 1973, naming title, author and information about the reprint-publisher, the other one is the original frontispiece as I’m supposing. This contains a large illustration with the tilte and a short introduction incorporated.
The book is structured in the following way: The five orders are presented in five individual chapters. Tuscana, Dorica, Ionica, Corinthia and Composita each start with one or two pages of descriptive text, followed by several pages of exemplary illustrations of columns, facades, bridges, towers, plans and so on. There are 24 full pages of illustrations (including the frontispiece) in total. The total number of pages is 59 (61, if you include the first page with only the title). The book does not have an index or table of contents.
The book furthermore measures 396 mm in height and 280 mm in width. It has a thickness of roughly 8 mm. It doesn’t seem to fall into any of the standard book sizes, although it comes closest to a Folio.