A Manual of Engineering Specifications and Contracts: Designed as a Text Book and Work Reference for All Who May Be Engaged in the Theory or Practice of Engineering

IN some well-regulated engineering and architects' offices, there may be found a collection of printed forms of contracts and of specifications; preserved specimens, as it were, of the blossomings whence once developed the fruit of that and of other offices. The book before us is so constituted that it may take the place of the above-named motley collection. There can be little question, of course, in the minds of experienced persons, as to the utility of a handy collection of forms for contracts, specifications, bonds and advertisements belonging to the profession. These are matters of wearying detail, which it were sinful waste to excogitate out of the depths of one's own consciousness and experience at every call thereon. Whence it happens, that in the United States and other public architectural and engineering offices of the country, there are printed blank forms for all such documents; and it is from a very judicious selection of such forms, and some derived from private practice, that the present book has been put together. They include not only engineering works, as the title might lead any one to suppose, but a good deal of architectural work besides. We have, for example, "Estimate for an art-building at the International Exhibition, specifications for a college building, and for a railroad depot." As a connecting link between architecture and engineering, unless it may be found in the railroad depot, is a set of documents, being all that is necessary for the specifying, the advertising for bids, and the contracting for the erection of a lighthouse, and the same series of papers for a large variety of the works that ordinarily come within the province of the engineer, classified under the heads, "18iver and Harbor Improvements, Municipal Works, and Railroad Engineering, including engines and rolling stock." And as the future writer of specifications and contracts, the student, for whom more especially this work seems to have been designed, must know something of the nature of drawings, and of the manner of making measurements and estimates of all kinds of work, two short chapters on these subjects precede the bulk and body of the work. The close consists of a semi-legal consideration of the nature of contracts with samples of contracts for different kinds of work. No great originality ought of course to be expected from a work like this, in which the classification of documents already in existence must play so important a part; but this classification has been exceedingly well done, developing, not infrequently, into a codification of the subject matter.... --American Architect and Architecture, Vol. 3