Folio (429 x 288 mm). Contemporary full calf, the spine divided into seven compartments with raised bands, gilt lettering to the second compartment, the remainder decorated with gilt floral tools, gilt roll tool edges, the head and tail of the spine expertly repaired, all edges speckled red; engraved allegorical frontispiece after a design by Sebastien Le Clerc, title-page, pp. viii, 354, (pp.226-227, misnumbered 216-217, p. 68, misnumbered 286), [16], contents, corrections and privilege, 68 engraved plates within the text, numbered I-LXV, with three additional plates engraved by Pierre le Pautre, , ** and *****, 87 woodcut text figures; a bookplate (?) sometime removed neatly from the recto of the f.f.e.p., small tear to the upper margin of p.153 without loss to the text, small area of abrasion to the upper corner of p.213, small tear to the lower corner of p.343, occasional light spotting, one or two old ink splashes to the fore-edges, two tiny wormholes adjacent to one another in the upper margin of pp.240-354, not affecting the text or the plates, otherwise a bright, clean copy.

Provenance: Ambrose Lisle March Phillipps de Lisle (1809-1878) with his engraved armorial bookplate to the front pastedown. Converted to Catholicism in adolescence, in 1835 De Lisle founded the Cistercian Mount St. Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire, making it the first monastery to be built in England since the Reformation. Edmund Sheridan Purcell, in his and Edwin De Lisle’s Life and Letters of Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, notes that, ‘In that early day [following the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829] no one did more for the Catholic revival in England, almost single-handed, than Phillipps de Lisle’.

Second edition, revised, corrected and enlarged. As a result of the readings and debates that had taken place in the Académie Royale D’Architecture following the publication of the first edition in 1673, Perrault found it necessary to make a number of corrections and revisions for the second edition, while still holding to his initial arguments. In addition one of the original engraved plates was redrawn and reset, making it easier to read. The three new engraved plates show the celebrated ruins of a Roman temple sited on the banks of the Garonne at Bordeaux, a contemporary ballista designed to catapult grenades and finally, the wooden machinery employed to lift building stone during the construction of the east facade of the Louvre.

Stock number: 1540