Victorian Cottage Architecture: An American Catalog of Designs, 1891

At the end of the nineteenth century, carpenter, architect, and publisher George Franklin Barber began publishing his residential designs in inexpensive, illustrated catalogs. Containing order forms and price lists for the drawings, the catalogs were not the first to sell private homes to the public on a widespread basis but were the first to give customers an opportunity to participate in custom-designing their own houses.
Reaching thousands of potential clients throughout the United States...