to furnish it, and to those who do not have it themselves, but who know
where it is to be found, to get it for us, or to put us in the way of
getting it. Plans, elevations, perspectives, sketches, photographs,
negatives, descriptions, whatever is good, we want to show, for the
benefit and reputation of the profession in America far more than for
our own, for we know better than the profession how very valuable
publicity of the kind is to architects. The late Mr. Richardson, even to
a comparatively late period in his professional career, was afflicted
with the usual bashfulness about having his work published. We well
remember the solicitations, the refusals, the renewed appeals, and,
finally, the reluctant and conditional assent to have a single gelatine
print from one of his perspectives published. This was the drawing, we
think, of the Woburn Library, and was accompanied by a plan. Finding
that he had suffered no severe injury from this exposure of his design
to the gaze of the cold world, Mr. Richardson soon became one of our
kindest friends, and if reputation and employment are things to be
desired by an architect, we may say with all due modesty that what he
did for us was repaid to him a hundred-fold, for, great as was his
talent, it must, without the publicity given to his work through means
like ours, have had for years only a local influence. As it was,
however, every issue of ours with one of his designs was studied in a
thousand offices and imitated in hundreds; his name was in the mouths of
all architects throughout the Union; our plates were reproduced abroad;
the illustrated magazines, finding his reputation already made in the
profession, hastened to spread it among the public; and at his lamented
death, a few years later, he was the central figure of American
architecture. Now, although we do not say that all the architects who
send us their drawings will attain the fame of a Richardson, we do say
that Richardson would never have attained a fraction of his reputation
if he had not allowed his designs to be published, and we need hardly