Musgrove John (Ed.). Sir Banister Fletcher's: A History of Architecture

19-th edition — Butterworths, 1987. — 1688 p.The many innovations of content and form in this edition are described in the Introduction (itself an innovation), and if my distinguished predecessor, James Palmes, was justified in describing some of the changes he himself made to the book as ‘controversial’ (Preface to the eighteenth edition), I can only hope mine will not find criticism in harsher terms. Be that as it may, the Trustees of the Banister Fletcher bequest wished the work to continue as a world history of architecture in a single volume; after much deliberation it was concluded that this implied shifting the balance of the book’s contents—solidly established though it had been for many years with twelve chapters on European architecture (about twentyfive per cent of the total in the seventeenth and eighteenth editions) between the Byzantine Empire and the Renaissance. This number has been reduced to two: Romanesque has been revised and compiled from the chapters of the earlier edition, Gothic completely rewritten and considerably shortened. When the European story is taken up again, it is after dealing with other pre-Renaissance architecture worldwide. The Renaissance in Europe is then presented in amore concentrated series of chapters, also rewritten and reclassified. Growing architectural interest in the adaptation and creative use of various Renaissance, neo-Classical and other revival styles in the countries occupied or colonised by Europeans is reflected in the penultimate part of the book and the twentiethcentury chapters are wholly new. The revised format sneaks for itself; I will say only that it is designed to make the book more comfortable to handle, as well as to obtain more words per page with the same type size—the larger page gives a bonus of slightly larger reproductions of the study sheet drawings which have been rephotographed from the originals for this edition.