Recueil de planches, sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts méchaniques, avec leur explication
This is an 18th-century French plate volume, the Recueil de planches of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, published in Paris in 1762 for readers of the Enlightenment encyclopedia. Its engraved plates show technical trades and machines, drawn in fine line with lettered figure keys. A designer can take from them the clean, diagrammatic style of mechanical drawing, with sectioned views, numbered parts and orderly grids of small figures laid out on the page.
