Montpelier: Daniel Pech, 1671. First edition, very rare, of this important work, of which “less than a dozen copies are known to exist, most imperfect” (The Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library, vol. 2, p. 153. “Sold only by the author at his home in Montpellier, the Pratique contains clear..... More
Item #3380

Hambourg [i.e., Leiden]: [Élie Luzac], 1753. First edition, rare, of this collection of pamphlets relating to the ‘König affair,’ the celebrated polemic on the principle of least action, “perhaps the ugliest of all the famous scientific disputes” (DSB VII: 442). The König affair is of considerable importance in the history..... More
Item #4957

Messina: Pietro Spira, August 1558. First edition, ‘excessively rare’ (Sotheran), of this collection of works on ‘spherics’, the geometrical and trigonometrical techniques necessary for the description of the motion of the celestial bodies, including Maurolico’s Latin translations of works by four ancient Greek writers, Autolycus, Menelaus, Euclid and Theodosius, those..... More
Item #2881

London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1876. First edition, rare on the market in this condition, of Maxwell's textbook on dynamics, “a masterpiece of natural philosophy, notable especially for introducing into physics the term relativity in a passage that combines strenuous scientific insight with a mystical awareness … [It] had..... More
Item #3849

[London:]: Taylor and Francis, [1867]. First edition, in the very rare original printed wrappers, of the first practical designs for a dynamo, made independently and almost simultaneously by Siemens and Wheatstone. Maxwell attended the February 1867 meeting of the Royal Society at which both papers were read, and he immediately..... More
Item #4305

Washington: Carnegie Institution. First edition, the very rare offprint issue, of the first of the papers documenting McClintock’s discovery of ‘control elements,’ for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1983. “Between 1948 and 1951, McClintock carried out a series of sophisticated experiments with variegated maize..... More
Item #3910

[London: Macmillan, 1939]. First edition, extremely rare offprint, of the discovery of nuclear fission, a process which had been observed by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann the previous year but for which they were unable to provide an explanation. “In the late 1930s, a series of experiments showed that bombarding..... More
Item #5323

London: Taylor & Francis, 1910. A fine copy of Millikan’s famous experiment, later known as the ‘oil-drop experiment’, in which he first provided the definitive proof that all electrical charges are exact multiples of a definite, fundamental value—the charge of the electron. Millikan’s experiment is nowadays known as the ‘oil-drop..... More
Item #4548

Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1866 [- 1864]. First edition, journal issues in the original printed wrappers, of two of the most important papers in the early history of topology, including the introduction (and illustration) in the 1865 paper of the famous ‘Möbius band’ (or ‘Möbius strip’). “August Möbius was one of..... More
Item #4826

London: W[illiam]. Pearson for the Author, 1718. First edition, and an unusually fine copy without any restoration, of this classic on the theory of probability, the first original work on the subject in English. “De Moivre’s book on chances is considered the foundation for the field of probability and statistics”..... More
Item #4637

Pesaro; Bologna: apud Hieronymum Concordiam; Costantino Pisarri, 1588 [colophon, 1587]; 1711. First edition, the beautiful Macclesfield copy, of Guidobaldo’s Paraphrasis, the important companion to his Mechanicorum liber (1577), regarded as the greatest work on statics since the Greeks, which employed the mathematically rigorous proofs of Archimedes to the investigation of..... More
Item #4716

Paris: J. Quilau, 1713. Extremely rare presentation copy inscribed by the author of the greatly enlarged second edition of the first separately published textbook of probability. This second edition is arguably more important than the first, as it contains the first publication of extensive correspondence between Montmort and Johann I...... More
Item #5063

Paris: Jacque Quillau, 1708. First edition, first issue, very rare, of the first separately published textbook of probability. This issue has significant textual differences from what is usually referred to as the first edition. “In 1708 [Montmort] published his work on Chances, where with the courage of Columbus he revealed..... More
Item #4632