Great Georgian Houses Of America - Vol I

If symmetry had a fan club, Great Georgian Houses of America – Vol. I (1970, Dover Publications) would be its glossy yearbook: all fanlights, Palladian daydreams, and doorcases that make an entrance before you do. Compiled by the delightfully intrepid Architects Emergecy Committee (long story, fewer vowels), this is the grand tour of American Georgian bravado—the red-brick diplomacy that announced, with impeccable cornice lines, “Yes, we borrowed the rules from Palladio, and no, we’re not giving them back.”

Open it and you’re knee-deep in measured drawings, elevations, sections, and those delicious moulding profiles that make carpenters go quiet with respect. Porticoes parade past like debutantes with impeccable entablatures. Dentils line up like well-bred soldiers. Quoins flirt. Sash windows—tall, calm, and perfectly proportioned—remind you that geometry can be sexy. Dover, in full Dover mode, delivers the plates with a librarian’s patience and a draughtsman’s precision, so you can trace a cornice, argue about a pediment, and then actually build the thing (or at least judge your neighbour’s attempt).

The text is equal parts handbook and love letter. You get site histories, plan logic, craftsmanship notes, and enough architectural gossip to recognise a correctly bossed keystone at twenty paces. It’s fieldwork for armchairs: Charleston to Newport, brick to stone, Ionic to “try not to mix orders unless you can get away with it.” The message throughout is clear: simplicity is not simple, proportion is a discipline, and a good doorway is basically an RSVP to civilisation.

Our copy is Condition: Good, which in Crappy Old Books dialect means: sound binding, honest shelfwear, a jacket that’s seen a few polite tea-times, and pages that have been turned with the kind of care usually reserved for balustrades over stair voids. Expect a clean interior, corners that admit time exists, and a general air of “has been consulted, not coddled.” In other words, exactly the sort of book Georgian houses themselves would approve of: dignified, functional, and ready for another century.

Highlights include:

• Measured drawings so crisp you can practically hear the pencil whisper “entasis.”

• Portico etiquette: when to Tuscan, when to Ionic, when to stop.

• Plan geometry that proves symmetry is a lifestyle choice, not a fad.

• Craft detail—mantels, cornices, stair brackets—that turns timber into a sermon.

The ISBN (for those who collect numbers with their cornices): 0486224910. Whisper it at a salvage yard and someone will produce a box of period-correct hinges and a knowing nod.

Recommended for:

• Designers with a secret spreadsheet of ratios.

• Home restorers who keep calipers near the coffee filters.

• Readers who think a well-drawn elevation can fix a bad day (it can).

Take this Good survivor home and let it re-square your life: one bay, one pilaster, one exquisitely aloof fanlight at a time. You bring the wall space; it brings the gravitas. Crappy Old Books: lowering your standards just enough to raise your standards—now with more dentils.

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