The Simple Home

Santa Barbara: P. Smith, 1979. Reprint of the 1904 ed. Octavo with green and tan half-cloth boards and black text; xlvi, 55 pages, 13 unnumbered leaves of plates: illustrations; 21 cm Near fine copy with clean pages and tight binding; small scratch to front board and moderate sunning to spine; ink inscription on front flyleaf. Hardcover. ISBN: 9780879050573, 0879050578

New introduction by Dimitri Shipounoff. A reprint of the 1904 "bible" of the Bay Area Hillside Club. "The architectural developments of the unique San Francisco Bay Region style left perhaps its most important literary legacy in Charles Keeler's little book "The Simple Home". This book, dedicated to the architect Bernard Maybeck, was largely a polemic against the architectural shams and gingerbread of the Victorian age, and a paean to "a simpler, a truer, a more vital expression" then taking place in California. Charles Keeler, a Berkeley poet, naturalist, and self-appointed policeman of the arts wrote on architecture from the standpoint of a layman." --Introduction.