Tuesday, February 20, 2024

DY24007 The History of Architecture 1938 V01 200224

Use this link to view Pillar and Post by Osbert Lancaster

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y1ba3gqSzS-erzoi8VM6u8AHqiwq0PjO/view?usp=sharing

This book was so near to going to landfill sitting on the top of a black bin bag in the far corner of a Gloucester City Centre charity shop. The outer cover was seriously stained and inside the paper was falling apart and torn. But when I picked it up the drawings inside captured my imagination particularly the small people included in each drawing. So 10 years ago it was saved from destruction and has sat on my bookshelf ever since waiting to be digitised for posterity. This is what DMB Publishing does, it rescues old books and freely shares them with anyone interested. If you read the text in the book you will soon appreciate you have in Osbert Lancaster a real character with strong views. So then you Google his name and realise his biography on Wikipedia takes up over 20 pages so you know you are dealing with one enormous character. Further investigation soon shows this Pillar to Post Book is stored and available to read on the Internet Archive Website and they have used all their technology to digitise it 2019. So I am not the saviour of this masterpiece. But I suspect you would never have heard about it nor Osbert Lancaster (1908 - 1986) without reading this blog.  

Its works very well as a scrolled PDF with a page of narrative about the architectural style followed by one of his brilliant drawings illustrating the style. But for me its the people I like to look at and although they are small you can see their personality. You can tell Osbert Lancaster was a gifted cartoonist as well as an architectural historian.   

Use this link to view his Wikipedia Biography

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osbert_Lancaster


Baroque. Being slightly rude in a cartoonist way.



Georgian (Town) with the plague of road works.



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