Recueil de planches, sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts méchaniques, avec leur explication
This is an 18th-century French encyclopedia plate collection, the Recueil de planches of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, published in Paris in 1762 for a general readership of tradesmen, artisans and scholars. The pictures are precise black-and-white copperplate engravings of machines and instruments with numbered figures and scale bars, showing how mechanical parts fit together. A designer might take from them the clarity of technical line drawing, the way labelled sections and measurement scales organise a page, and the spare hatching used to describe wood and metal.
