Folio (507 x 370 mm.) Bound in contemporary full calf, red lettering piece to the spine; 2 ff., xxviii pp., with 150 engraved plates, several double-page; some wear to the corners of the binding and insignificant waterstains to the lower corners of the text block, but overall an excellent copy and rarely found thus.
This was surely the most popular and influential architectural book of the eighteenth century; its impact extended well beyond Great Britain and America to the West Indies, South America, India and even South Africa. Robin Middleton in Millard British Books notes 'The sheer number and variety of buildings and ornamental forms provided by Gibbs clearly appealed to amateur architects and craftsmen’, he goes on to point out that 'The influence of A Book of Architecture was enormous. St. Martin-in-the-Fields served as a model for church-building throughout the English-speaking world, and in particular in the American colonies, where architects such as Peter Harrison drew heavily from its example. The extraordinarily diverse and numerous borrowings from Gibbs through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including those of Thomas Jefferson for Monticello, are carefully studied by Terry Friedman in James Gibbs, Yale, 1984’.
The work represents the first collection of the work of a single architect to be published in Britain and reveals Gibbs (1682-1754) in his fullest architectural expression, the designer of churches, country houses, garden buildings and pavilions, the "New Building" of King's College Cambridge, the Senate House, and also of church monuments, urns and pedestals, chimney pieces, doors, windows, and much more. The work is a cornerstone to any significant architectural library.

First edition. A second edition was issued on subscription in 1738 and completed the following year.
BAL Early Printed Books 1206; Berlin Katalog 2270; Fowler 138; Harris/Savage 257; Millard: British Books 22.

Stock number: 1665