"Since the Renaissance books and drawings have been a primary means of communication among architects and their colleagues and clients. In this volume, twelve historians explore the use of books by architects in America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period when the profession of architecture was first emerging in the United States.". "The essays in this volume range from studies of architectural publications available in the colonies to the appearance of American architectural incunabula to the revolution in architectural publishing that occurred in the 1830s and 1840s."--BOOK JACKET.