Bibliotheca Radcliviana: or, a Short Description of the Radcliffe Library, at Oxford. Containing its Several Plans, Uprights, Sections, and Ornaments, on Twenty Three Copper Plates, Neatly Engraved, with the Explanation of each Plate.

First edition, folio (435 x 275 mm), 12pp., engraved portrait frontispiece of Gibbs by Hogarth, one further engraved portrait of Johannes Radcliffe, 21 engraved plates, a very good ex-library copy, frontis., portrait with repairs to corners, water-stain to fore-edge slightly encroaching into image, title a little dusty and creased, with repairs to corners, plates with light damp-stain to outer blank corners, last plate a little more so with a couple of minor closed tears, endpapers renewed, several blind-stamps, later brown buckram, uncut. The Radcliffe Library, better known as the Radcliffe Camera, designed by James Gibbs in neo-classical style and built in 1737-1749 to house the Radcliffe Science Library, has been described as `Englandís most accomplished domed building and Gibbsís masterpieceí (Pevsner). Gibbs's account of it names the more important craftsmen employed - the masons were Townsend of Oxford and Smith of Warwick, Artari did the plasterwork and Rysbrack the sculpture - and the plates show elevations, sections and interior details. Harris, 256; RIBA, Early Printed Books, II: 1205; Fowler, 139.