Practical Organ Building

Frontispiece
By W. E. DICKSON, M.A. PRECENTOR OF ELY CATHEDRAL
SECOND EDITION, REVISED, WITH ADDITIONS
LONDON CROSBY LOCKWOOD AND CO. 7, STATIONERS' HALL COURT, LUDGATE HILL 1882
LONDON: PRINTED BY J. S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED, CITY ROAD.

PREFACE.
This little work is undertaken because it is believed that no treatise on the construction of organs, at once short, practical, and accessible by all classes of readers, is extant.
The bulky volume of Hopkins and Rimbault, worthy as it is of all commendation, and abounding with matter interesting to the musician, does not profess to enter into details essential to the workman. The same remark may be applied to sundry treatises in the form of articles contributed to Encyclopædias, or to periodicals of a popular kind. The writers of these articles, probably fully masters of the subject, cannot, from the very nature of the case, command the time, space, and amplitude of illustration absolutely necessary for the full elucidation of the mechanical processes involved in the construction of the most elaborate and ingenious of all musical instruments.
Readers of the French language, indeed, may find all that they require in a most admirable and exhaustive work, the Facteur d'Orgues, by M. Hamel, forming one of the series of the Manuels-Roret, published in 1849 by Roret of Paris, in three volumes, with an atlas of plates. The author of this complete exposition of the organ-builder's art has taken for the foundation of his book the great work of Dom Bedos, a Benedictine monk, who printed in 1766-78, at Paris, two sumptuous folio volumes, with plates, which leave unnoticed nothing which was known or practised by the workmen of his period. The modern editor, however, who displays a most intimate knowledge of his subject, together with an enviable power of explaining it in all its minutest details, aided, as he is, by the most accurate of all European languages, has produced in his third volume a manual of the art of organ-building in recent times, which covers the whole field of investigation, and of which it is not too much to say that it can never be surpassed.