Frankfurt: Godefrid Tampach, 1611. First edition, extremely rare, of the first scientific treatise on crystallography. Written in the form of a letter, this small tract was presented to Kepler’s friend at court, Matthäus Wackher von Wackenfels (who had informed Kepler of the discoveries Galileo had made with the telescope in..... More
Item #4960

Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt & Soner, 1904. First edition, extremely rare offprint issue, inscribed by the author to Fredholm, of von Koch’s paper, which contains the first examples of geometric fractals, the famous ‘Koch curve’ and ‘Koch snowflake’. The term ‘fractal’ was coined much later, by Benoit Mandelbrot in his 1975..... More
Item #3660

Augsburg: Christoph Peter Detleffsen for the widow of Eberhard Klett, 1760. First edition, and a remarkably fine copy, of this cornerstone of modern optics, with applications which touch on astronomy and photography; this is one of the rarest of modern science books of this stature. “It established a complete system..... More
Item #4778

Münich: F. Straub for the Verlag der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1912. First edition, very rare offprint issue, of Laue’s Nobel Prize-winning report of “one of the most beautiful discoveries in physics” (Einstein). X-rays had been in wide use since their discovery in 1895 but their exact nature as..... More
Item #4852

Paris: H. Estienne & W. Hopyl, 27 June 1503. First edition of this very rare collection of works, in an attractive Roger Payne binding. The individual works are all first editions with the exception of Lefèvre’s Epitome of Boethius’ De arithmetica (first, 1496) and an unattributed Opusculum de p[r]axi numerorum..... More
Item #3866

Berlin: Johann Christian Papen, 1710. First edition, rare, of this milestone in computer history, Leibniz’s description of his famous calculating machine, the first stepped-drum calculator, and the first machine that could perform multiplication and division. “Leibniz studied Morland’s and Pascal’s various designs and set himself the task of constructing a...... More
Item #4596

London: Printed by S[arah]. G[riffin]. and B[ennet]. G[riffin]. for Benjamin Tooke and Thomas Sawbridge, [1669]. First edition, first issue, extremely rare, of the first of Leybourn’s books on the subject. This issue has ‘dialling:’ in line 2 of the title and lacks imprint date; the more common (but still rare)..... More
Item #4610

Kazan: Universitetskai︠a︡ tip. 1835. First edition, incredibly rare offprint, of this important book-length memoir on the foundations of calculus and real analysis by the first inventor of non-euclidean geometry. “As early as 1835, Lobachevsky showed in a memoir [the offered work] the necessity of distinguishing between continuity and differentiability” (Cajori..... More
Item #3652

Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1895. First edition, the copy of The Garden Ltd., of Lorentz’s major work on the electrodynamics of moving bodies “which soon became a classic” (Schaffner, p. 503). It was in this work that he introduced the concept of ‘local time’, a “major discovery” (Hoffmann, p. 86), and..... More
Item #4924

London: John Murray, 1830-1832-1833. First edition of this “classic by ‘the father of modern geology’” (Grolier/Horblit), famous for “establishing a new era in geology” (DSB), presenting the doctrine of uniformitarianism, namely, that the processes of the past must be judged by those of the present. “One of the key works..... More
Item #5181

London: Printed for the author’s children and sold by A. Millar, et al. 1748. First edition, large-paper copy, of Maclaurin’s statement of Newtonian theory, one of the three “most outstanding popular introductions to Newtonian science of the eighteenth century” (I. B. Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 1956, p. 209). “Though a...... More
Item #3409

Edinburgh: Printed by T.W. and T. Ruddimans, 1742. First edition, a very fine large and thick paper copy, of “the earliest logical and systematic publication of the Newtonian methods. It stood as a model of rigor until the appearance of Cauchy’s Cours d’Analyse in 1821” (DSB). The Treatise was written..... More
Item #4222

Bologna: per l’herede del Benacci, 1660. First and only edition of this important work on the making of lenses, spectacles, telescopes and microscopes, “the most comprehensive book on the subject” (Ilardi, p. 229). “Seventeenth-century account of dioptrics, dealing with light, refraction, the eye, vision, the invention of spectacles, the making..... More
Item #4948