On Saturday, on my way to Han’s, I passed the Somerset Book Barn as I normally do but popped in to search for an old book on fish anatomy which, after an hour plus, I had not found. However on my wanderings through the endless dusty book corridoors I found, and bought, Cathedrals of the United Kingdom: Their History, Architecture, Monument, and Traditions (Mackenzie Walcott, 1860, £2), The Aesthetic Aspect of Civil Engineering Design: A Record of six Lectures delivered at The Institution (The Institution of Civil Engineers, 1945, £4), and The Holy Bible (1902, £2).

My new purchases are on the right and on the left are items bought from previous visits. I actually bought two copies of Calculus made easy giving the other copy to Chris Williams as he once mentioned having this book as a child ~ seems he has come a long way since then.

I am especially pleased with my copy The Aesthetic Aspect of Civil Engineering Design which included summary remarks next to the six author’s names (Good, Tedious & irrelevant, Good, Vague but interesting, Dull, Good) presumably by Rope Abbott (?).

At some point I intend to give my own summary of the lectures making note of what is relevant today and what is out of date but for now I leave you with figure two from lecture two,

and a quote mashed together using extracts of the first page of my Book Barn books in order of their published date:

Christian architecture is… without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said,… I should like to begin by asking one or two questions… any fool can see that if x is considered as… beads in a necklace that half the population of the world has been… fitted up in accordance with the latest sanitary knowledge, reduces the need for medicine to… important formulae taken from the fields of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry… of men wearing tattersal shirts with knit ties and suede shoes, they might wonder how a look of the early 1960s could hold sway for so long.

Perhaps it would be enlightening to list the other books:

• Fletcher, Sir Banister and Fletcher, Major H. Phillips. (1954). Architectural Hygiene or Sanitary Science as Applied to Buildings. (9th ed.) London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd.
• Hubbard, Bill Jr. (1996). A Theory for Practice,: Architecture in Three Courses. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
• Kasner, E. and Newman, J. (1949). Mathematics and the Imagination. London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd.
• Oakley, C. O. (1957). Analytic Geometry. (3rd ed.) New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc.
• Thompson, Silvanus P. (1946). Calculus Made Easy. 3rd ed. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd.