Highly Anticipated New Edition of Brownstone Bible Will Debut in October

The bible of brownstone heritage will soon be back in print.

“Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House,” Charles Lockwood’s 1972 doorstop of a book that coincided with (and helped to fuel) the renewed interest in the 19th century row houses that define the Brooklyn landscape, will be republished in a new edition by Rizzoli in October.

The seminal work, published when Lockwood was only 24, was an ambitious and in-depth undertaking that fueled the brownstoner and preservation movements and delved into the finer points of tea rooms, floor plans and the development of Manhattan but gave short shrift to the later Victorian period and early 20th century.

The new edition will feature all-new and updated text, along with new photography and design. It has new color photographs sprinkled throughout, historical photographs not in previous editions, revised text based on new research, more about Brooklyn, and reconfigured and new chapters that delve into the late Victorian and early 20th century periods.

Preservationists Patrick Ciccone and Jonathan Taylor and photographer Dylan Chandler contributed to the expanded reissue of the book. Lockwood, who occasionally contributed to Brownstoner, passed away at the age of 63 in 2012.

The third edition took seven years to come together. “At a certain point, I decided that [for the book] to be around for another four or five decades, we needed to basically make a new book,” Ciccone told Brownstoner. “Not a new book in content or the physical sense, but in terms of layout and design.”

All the contemporary photography has been reshot in color by Chandler. They also went through a process of what Ciccone calls “rebalancing the book,” meaning that two new chapters have been added with new material that expands on part of the original. He likened the process to historic preservation.

Lockwood, he said, would have been excited that the new edition was finally seeing the light of day. In updating this classic tome for a new audience, Ciccone repeated a quote from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel “The Leopard,” to illustrate his point: “For everything to stay the same, everything must change.”

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