Christiana: Groendahl, 1824. First edition of this “publication now considered one of the greatest rarities in mathematical literature” (Ore, p. 73), as well as one of the most famous. This is likely the only copy in private hands. It contains the first complete proof (albeit with some vagueness due to..... More
Item #5834

Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1693. First edition of this superb collection of thirty-one treatises by the leading scientists of seventeenth-century France, almost all of which are published here for the first time. This is one of the earliest important publications of the Académie des Sciences, and one of the most magnificent..... More
Item #4565

A fine copy of this "master treatise on optics that synthesized the works of Euclid, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Vitellion, Roger Bacon, Pena, Ramus (Pierre de la Ramee), Risner, and Kepler." (DSB). "Aguilon was one of the first of a long line of distinguished Jesuit writers on optics. His treatise has..... More
Item #5710

Paris: David l’ainé [Colophon: De l'imprimerie de Jean-Baptiste Coignard, imprimeur du roi], 1749. First edition of one of d’Alembert’s most important books, widely regarded as the foundation work of the dynamics of rigid bodies. “The precession of the equinoxes had been observed in antiquity by Hipparchus. Newton explained the cause..... More
Item #5297

Paris: David l’ainé, 1743. First edition of one of the classics in the history of science, d’Alembert’s formalization of the new science of mechanics. “The ‘Treatise on Dynamics’ was d’Alembert’s first major book and it is a landmark in the history of mechanics. It reduces the laws of the motion..... More
Item #5878

Upsalla: W. Schultz, 1868. First edition, a very fine copy in unrestored original printed wrappers, and rare thus, of one of the founding works of spectroscopy in which Ångström demonstrated the presence of hydrogen and a number of other elements in the sun; the atlas contains his great map of..... More
Item #4831

Antwerp: [colophon:] Excusum Antuerpiae opera Aegidius (Gillis) Coppens van Diest for Gregorius Bontius, 1545. An exceptional and entirely unsophisticated working copy of one of the most influential scientific books of the sixteenth century—the compact manual that taught Europe how to measure and describe the world. In its original limp-vellum binding..... More
Item #6474

[Colophon:] Venice: Bernardinus Bindonus, 1537. First edition, signed and heavily annotated by John Dee (1527–1608/9) during his Louvain residence in 1549, and acquired and signed eighty-two years later by John Winthrop Jr. (1606–1676), physician, alchemist, first Governor of Connecticut and the first colonial American elected Fellow of the Royal Society..... More
Item #5650

Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1837-41. First edition of one of the great rarities of chemistry, and especially rare in the original printed wrappers as here. This monumental work is the only large-scale publication of Avogadro (1776-1856), famous for his eponymous hypothesis (1811) that equal volumes of all gases at the same..... More
Item #4470

Frankfurt: Wolfgang Richter for Anton Humm, 1614. First editions of these two rare works on optics by the ‘Doctor Mirabilis’ Roger Bacon (1214/1220-1292) – ‘perspectiva’ for Bacon had a different meaning from today’s ‘perspective’. Bacon’s “skill in mathematics, experimental science and mechanical inventions was so remarkable for his time that..... More
Item #5811

New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1949. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of the first comprehensive report on the transistor, one of the most important inventions of the 20th Century. “In the 1930s, Bell Labs scientists were trying to use ultrahigh frequency waves for telephone communications..... More
Item #5489

Dresden: Matthes Stöckel, 1583. First edition, a very fine copy, of the founding monument of ophthalmology and one of the supreme achievements of sixteenth-century medical illustration. Written by the Saxon court oculist Georg Bartisch (1535–c. 1607) in vigorous German vernacular, financed and supervised by the author himself, and printed at..... More
Item #6511

Plattsburgh, NY: F. P. Allen, 1833. First edition, inscribed by Beaumont to James W. Kingsbury, of “the most important study of digestion before Pavlov” (Garrison-Morton), this is “the first great American contribution to physiology” and “the most important presentation copy extant” (historyofinformation.com). Sir William Osler called Beaumont (1785-1853) “the pioneer..... More
Item #5501