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K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture , second edition, vol. 1, in two parts. Oxford, 1969. Pp. 684, 140 plates, 689 figs. £36.

All students of the Muslim world have over the years seen, at times even consulted, the four huge volumes on Early Muslim Architecture and Muslim Architecture in Egypt known to specialists as simply 'Creswell'. Their light-green binding and their imperially inordinate size are as easily distinguishable as the blue and almost equally large Survey of Persian Art. They form the core of any self-respecting library on Islamic culture. The first of these volumes, dealing with the Umayyads, was published in 1932. It so happens that the following thirty years were unusually rich in new discoveries of Umayyad art and, more than any of the others, the first volume of Creswell's history had become very much out of date and incomplete. Hence Professor Creswell undertook the momentous task of putting together a new edition of his first volume. The result consists in two tomes, nearly 700 pages and over 800 illustrations. In this age it is an astounding accomplishment, for the quality of presentation, the excellence of all drawings, the comparative material, and the illustrations of Umayyad monuments all belong to the highest levels of craftsmanship and of production. Color plates have been added; all of them exhibit the excellence of Skira work except the frontispiece of the first volume, a rather garish section of the Dome of the Rock. A few of the old plates may have lost some of their clarity, but still, as one leafs through the volume, one cannot avoid the sad feeling that such books are no longer going to be produced, that one is witnessing the end of a tradition of books made as much for the pleasure of being handled as for their content.