WILLIAMSTOWN, MA.- The Williams College Museum of Art opened the exhibit Buildings Fit to Print: Classical Architecture in Books from the Chapin Library through February 11, 2007. The digital revolution is transforming our knowledge of architecture in ways as radical as the printing revolution of the fifteenth century. This exhibition, a collaboration with the Chapin Rare Book Library, examines aspects of printed and virtual material as they promote the dissemination of architectural ideas and forms.

Besides a wide array of illuminated and decorated manuscripts and books, hundreds of illustrated books, books with inserted prints, contemporary artist's books, rare books about art, architecture, and crafts, and a small number of manuscripts by or relating to artists, the Chapin Library contains numerous separate prints, posters, paintings, drawings, photographs, and ephemera. These separate materials are contained primarily in the Library's Graphic Arts and Performing Arts collections, or are adjuncts to literary and historical collections. The Samuel "Erewhon" Butler Collection, for example, includes artworks by Butler, a skilled amateur painter, and his photographs of the sculpture at Varallo in northern Italy. Archives of the American poster artist and illustrator C.B. Falls and the Dutch-American architect and artist Herman Rosse are also in the Chapin Library, and include a variety of paintings, drawings, and fabric designs, as well as working books and papers.