The book “Treatise on Civil Architecture” by William Chambers (1723-1796) was published in 1759. William Chambers was one of the co-founders of the Royal Academy.
The book deals less with the construction and planning of a building than with the elements of architecture, such as the various types of columns, such as the Ionic Doric and Corinthian orders, or the ceiling.
The book does not have a table of contents, but after the foreword William Chambers made a list with the collaborators to produce this book. This list goes over two pages and shows a variety of names.
All 50 of the following illustrations in the book are hand-drawn.calibrated. It was special that in the illustrations, which were always drawn on a whole page, the reverse side is always an empty sheet (perhaps to protect the drawing). Another special feature is that when the page break happens in the middle of a sentence, the first words on the new page are already written on the previous page, and then repeated on the new page.
The book has a format of 55mm x 37.5mm which corresponds to the format of the folio. On the about 200 pages, which are all still in a relatively good condition, there are as already mentioned about 50 illustrations and just as many blank pages. So only about 100 pages are really text.
