Please join us for the next talk at the Book History Colloquium at Columbia.

Thursday, October 28, 2010
6:00 – 7:30PM
Butler Library, room 523

Kate Isard, Department of Art History, Columbia University, will speak about “Avery Annotated: Copy Specific Evidence and Architectural Books.”

Copy specific evidence in sixteenth-century books has tremendous scholarly value for the understanding of professional architectural practice in the early modern period.  Advances in printing enabled the previously impossible proliferation of published architectural books, which created the commonplace assumption that important and scholarly architects wrote treatises. Nevertheless, the question of how these books were actually used by architect-readers remains obscure.  Using examples from the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, this paper will describe the way in which annotations by early modern architect-readers are a valuable document that sheds light on the way in which early modern architects negotiated written words and printed visual forms, illustrating the interdependence of architectural theory and practice at the time.

The Book History Colloquium is free and open to to the public.