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Daniel Naegele, ed. The Letters of Colin Rowe: Five Decades of Correspondence London: Artifice Press, 2016, 560 pp., 11 b/w illus. $39.30 (cloth), ISBN 9781908967534 The Letters of Colin Rowe: Five Decades of Correspondence is an extraordinary book, one of gravitas and density, a compelling record of a life devotedly spent in pursuit of the idea of architecture. There is much to praise and little to criticize. In fact, in the preface, editor Daniel Naegele preempts criticism of the book's most obvious shortcoming, admitting that it includes few letters, or none at all, to Rowe's most important colleagues—James Stirling, Alvin Boyarsky, Colin St John Wilson, Robert Maxwell, Fred Koetter, John Hejduk, and Alan Colquhoun, among others. There is, by way of compensation, a rich body of letters to Henry-Russell Hitchcock. That so many letters are absent underscores just how prolific Colin Rowe was, for this volume is 560 pages. Its five-pound weight makes it feel like a little monument, or at least a block of marble. Naegele's labor of compilation and transcription here is considerable. He has written cogent biographical essays and introductions to each of the sections into which the letters are clustered: “Injury,” “America and Austin,” “Cambridge,” “Cornell at First,” “Disillusion,” “Publishing,” “Renown,” “Withdrawal,” “London,” and, finally, “Washington, D.C.,” where Rowe died in 1999. The editor's footnotes, however, are dizzyingly excessive. While helpful for truly obscure references, does this book's presumably well-educated audience really need to be schooled that a bientot is French and means “see you soon”; that NYT stands for The New York Times ; or that “Pyramid in the Cour Napoleon” is I. M. Pei's Louvre entrance? Are we to interpret this mania for notation as ironic, since Rowe never provided any notes? Or …