François Blondel’s book “Cours d’architecture enseigné dans l’Académie Royale d’Architecture” is written only on one column. Usually the headers of this text, composed of two volumes, are written with a small capital lettering and are positioned in the centre of the column. The font size of these headers is about twice as large as the font used in the text.
As for the margins of the text, these vary depending on the function of the page: in the case of a page containing a title, the margin is the same on both the right and left, and is about 4cm. In the case of a normal text page, the inner margin is much narrower than the outer margin. The margin above and below the text is also much wider than the margin on title pages.
The font of the text is often in Italic when accompanying one or more illustrations. Otherwise, the character used in the body of the text is “normal”. On the first page of the text we can notice the presence of characters written with a red ink but this only happens in this case. In the rest of the text the font remains only black.
The composition of these two volumes includes texts accompanied by very detailed drawings. These drawings are mostly architectural and mainly concern the decoration of the facades. These plates always cover one or more whole pages and are inserted within the whole text. It should be noted that the images are not coloured, but consist solely of black lines. I find that the number of pages with drawings is proportionate to the text itself, even if the number of pages with drawings is much lower than the number of pages of text.
In conclusion, the organisation of the tables of drawings in relation to the body of the text suggests, as the title of the book confirms, that the publication is mainly for educational purposes.