KEPLER, Johannes.

Somnium, seu opus posthumum de astronomia lunari. Divulgatum a Ludovico Kepplero filio. Sagan and Frankfurt: for the heirs of the author, 1634. [Bound with:] Ad epistolam … Jacobi Bartschii … praefixam Ephemeridi in annum 1629 responsio: De computatione et editione ephemeridum. Sagan [i.e., Görlitz?]: Typis Saganensibus, 1629. [Bound with:] Admonitio ad astronomos, rerumque coelestium studiosos, de raris mirisq (ue) anni 1631 ... iterumq (ue) edita à Jacobo Bartschio. Frankfurt: Gottfried Tambach, 1630. [Bound with:] Chilias logarithmorum ad totidem numeros rotundos, praemissa demonstration legitima ortus logarithmorum eorumque usus … [– Supplementum]. Marburg: Caspar Chemlin, 1639/25. [Bound with:] De vero anno quo aeternus dei filius humanam naturam in utero benedictae virginis Mariae assumpsit. Prius Teutonica lingua edita, nunc ad exterorum petitionem in Latinam linguam translata; & responsionibus ad obiecta Sethi Calvisii nuperrima locupletata … Frankfurt: Johann Bringer, 1614. [Bound with:] Eclogae chronicae ex epistolis doctissimorum aliquot virorum, & suis mutuis, quibus examinantur tempora nobilissima … Frankfurt: Gottfried Tambach, 1615.

1614-1639.

An extraordinary sammelband, with a remarkable provenance, containing six rare works by Kepler, including the first edition of Somnium, Kepler’s imaginary voyage to the moon, in which he utilizes the motions of the planets as they would be seen from the moon to argue for the Copernican system, and gives a remarkable description of the appearance of the earth as seen from the moon – this is Kepler’s rarest major work. “At Sagan, Kepler finally began to print a short book whose beginnings went back to his school days at Tübingen: his Somnium, seu astronomia lunari. The ‘Dream’ is a curiously interesting tract for two reasons. First, its fantasy framework of a voyage to the moon made it a pioneering and remarkably prescient piece of science fiction. Second, its perceptive description of celestial motions as seen from the moon produced an ingenious polemic on behalf of the Copernican system” (DSB). In The Dream, a young traveller lands on the Moon to find that lunar beings believe Earth revolves around them – from their cosmic vantage point, the Earth rises and sets against their firmament, something reflected even in the name they have given Earth: Volva. Kepler chose the name to emphasize the fact of Earth’s revolution – the very motion that made Copernicanism so dangerous to the dogma of cosmic stability. Kepler suggests that our own certitude about Earth’s fixed position in space is just as misguided as the lunar denizens’ belief in Volva’s revolution around them. The final part of the work is Kepler’s translation of, and commentary on Plutarch’s fantasy on the face of the moon. Kepler wrote Somnium in 1609, circulating it in manuscript form. Some 20 years later he added the dream framework and wrote the 223 notes, but it was only published after his death in 1630. Most of the book was printed in Sagan, whilst the title and dedication (by Kepler’s son) were printed in Frankfurt. Bound here with the Somnium are five other works by Kepler: the first edition of his Letter to Jacob Bartsch, which resulted in their joint production of the Ephemerides – this work is an important biographical source for Kepler’s life and final years; the second edition of Admonitio ad astronomos, Kepler’s correct prediction of the transits of Mercury and Venus across the face of the Sun in 1631; the second edition of Chillias logarithmorum (differing from the first in only the first two leaves), containing Kepler’s original construction of logarithmic tables which enabled him to complete the Tabulae Rudolphionae; and two works devoted to the issue of establishing a correct chronology of events described in the Holy Scriptures, the first edition of Eclogae chronicae and the first Latin edition of De vero anno. Caspar records twenty-two copies of the Somnium in German and Swiss libraries, the smallest number in his census for any major work of Kepler. Only three copies of the Somnium have appeared at auction in the last 40 years, of which only one was in a contemporary binding (the Richard Green copy, Sotheby’s, November 17, 1988, lot 12, $92,500).

Provenance: Title of the first-bound work, De vero anno, with two notes in ink: ‘Ex bibl. Nic. Heinsii / Frid. Ben. Carpzov / Lugduni Bat. 1683’ and ‘Ex auctione Carpzoviana / JPW A = 1700’. The first identifiable owner of the anthology was the Dutch classical scholar and poet Nicolaas Heinsius the Elder (1620-81), who spent several years in Stockholm at the court of Queen Christina. He assembled one of the largest private libraries in Europe, comprising some 13,000 books. The present sammelband is listed as no. 139 in Heinsiana, sive catalogus librorum … (Leiden, 1682), p. 220. The Leipzig lawyer and councilor Friedrich Benedict Carpzov the Elder (1649-99), who was co-editor of the Acta Eruditorum, assembled a large library which was auctioned after his death. The present sammelband is listed as no. 118 in the auction catalogue Bibliotheca Carpzoviana (Leipzig, 1700), p. 442 – it was sold for 2 talers, 19 groschen.

“When Kepler was enrolled at Tübingen University, the students there were required to compose a number of dissertations or disputations. One such composition written by Kepler in 1593 dealt with the following question: How would the phenomena occurring in the heavens appear to an observer stationed on the moon? Kepler had hit upon this ingenious device in an effort to overcome the deep-rooted hostility to the Copernican astronomy. According to Copernicus the earth moves very swiftly. But the people who live on the earth do not see or hear or feel this movement. Yet they can watch the moon perform various motions. These lunar motions, however, will escape detection by an observer located on the moon for the simple reason that he would be participating in those motions. Since the lunar motions would not be apparent to an observer there, by the same token the terrestrial motions are not noticed by observers here. This seems to have been the basic theme of Kepler’s 1593 dissertation.

“It was never presented as a Tübingen disputation, however, because Veit Müller, the professor in charge of those academic exercises, was so unalterably opposed to Copernicanism that he refused to permit Kepler’s theses to be heard. This rebuff did not dishearten the young student to the point of tearing up his work in disgust and throwing it away. On the contrary he kept it and bided his time until he would no longer be under the control of a reactionary and unsympathetic professor. This earliest draft has not survived – it was not mentioned in the first catalogue of Kepler’s manuscripts.

“That earliest draft was apparently left undisturbed for 16 years, during which all sorts of things happened to Kepler, both good and bad. Among the good things was his appointment as Imperial Mathematician. In this capacity he lived in Prague, which was then the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. There he became friendly with Wackher von Wackenfels, an official whose hobby was astronomy. The two friends frequently debated a variety of scientific questions, sharply but amicably. As a consequence of such good-natured disagreement, Kepler pulled his 1593 student dissertation out of a drawer and resumed work on it after a lapse of 16 years.

“In a public letter he remarked: ‘Last summer we engaged in these discussions to such an extent … that … I even founded a new astronomy, as it were, for those who live on the moon and, to put it plainly, a sort of lunar geography.’ Kepler’s ‘lunar geography’, as he calls it here, was written in 1609, since the public letter containing the remarks just quoted about ‘last summer’ bears the date April 19, 1610 …

“He devised the Dream framework in order to introduce a supernatural agency for the purpose of transporting a professional astronomical observer to the moon. A manuscript copy of this second stage was taken from Prague in 1611 and involved Kepler in the serious trouble which he recalls in Note 8 on the Dream. When that trouble finally came to an end, Kepler decided to have the work printed so that everybody could see how maliciously his adversaries had mininterpreted it while it was in manuscript. Having decided to publish the book, Kepler proceeded to add 223 explantory notes which are almost three times as long as the whole text of the Dream proper …

“The trouble which Kepler recalls in his Note 8 was the legal prosecution of his mother on charges of witchcraft. The poor old woman was saved from being put to death, in all probability, only by the steadfast and skilful intervention of her devoted son, the Imperial Mathematician. Having obtained his mother’s acquittal, Kepler went home to Linz, where he was then living, in November 1621. He wrote to his friend Matthias Bernegger (1581-1640), on December 4 1623: ‘Two years ago, as soon as I returned to Linz, I began to recast my Lunar Astronomy, or rather to clarify it by means of notes’ … [He later used this letter] as the Geographical Appendix to the Dream; his Notes on the Geographical Appendix were apparently composed after he moved to Silesia in 1628.

“In the final version of the Dream, therefore, we have a document in which, as though it were his swan song, Kepler reviewed the various phases of his long and turbulent life, and the successive stages in his intellectual development. Nowhere else in such brief compass is to be found Kepler’s own account of his stormy career, one of the main pathways leading to that awesome force which is modern science” (Rosen, pp. xvii-xx).

The following account of the ‘Dream’ is adapted from Christianson. It begins like a classical legend and relates the author’s ‘dream’ about the adventures of a young man, Duracotus, a native of Iceland. Duracotus’ mother, Fiolxhilde, supports both her son and herself by selling herbs, which have mysterious healing powers, to the sailors at a nearby port. One day, Duracotus cuts open a bag of herbs his mother intended to sell to a ship’s captain, scattering its contents on the ground. In a fit of anger Fiolxhilde sold her son to the captain in place of the lost herbs. The following day, the captain set sail for Norway but he stopped in Denmark to deliver a letter from a bishop in Iceland to Tycho Brahe. Duracotus became quite ill during the voyage, and he was put ashore when Tycho’s letter was delivered. The astronomer questioned the boy at some length, considered him to be quite intelligent, and undertook to train him in the science of astronomy.

After spending five years in Tycho’s company Duracotus took his master’s leave and sailed for home. Fiolxhilde expresses happiness over Duracotus’ acquaintance with the new science of the stars, and she confesses to her own special knowledge of the heavens and the fact that her teacher is none other than the ‘Daemon of Lavania’ – the spirit of the moon. She then reveals her ultimate secret: it is possible, with the assistance of the Daemon, to travel to Lavania and, quite predictably, she asks her son to accompany her on just such a lunar voyage. Duracotus consents and as soon as the sun set below the horizon, and was in conjunction with the planet Saturn in the sign of the Bull, Fiolxhilde summoned the Daemon and seated herself next to her son who covered their heads with a blanket. Within a few moments the journey of ‘fifty thousand German miles’ had begun, up through the ethereal regions to the moon.

We are informed that the flight of four hours is ‘most difficult and fraught with the greatest danger to life.’ Only those who are slender of body are acceptable, thus ruling out most German males whose general corpulence was apparently distasteful to the slender Kepler. In jest Kepler carried the matter further by pointing out the Daemon’s preference for ‘dried-up old women, experienced from an early age in riding he-goats at night or forked sticks or threadbare cloaks.’ It was to prove a most costly joke for, as noted above, it later backfired on its author whose own mother was accused of practicing witchcraft by superstitious neighbours and nearly burned at the stake by the authorities.

The take-off for the moon hits the traveller as a severe shock, ‘for he is hurled just as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas.’ In order to counteract what Isaac Newton would later define as the force of gravity, the moon voyagers are put to sleep with the aid of opiates and their limbs are arranged in such a way that their bodies will not be torn apart by the force of acceleration.Since breathing is inhibited by the swift passage of extremely cold air through the nostrils, damp sponges are applied to the face. Within a short time the speed of flight becomes so great that the body involuntarily rolls itself up into a ball and ‘we are carried along almost entirely by our will alone, so that finally the bodily mass proceeds toward its destination of its own accord’: Kepler had introduced the concept of ‘inertia’ to the physical sciences and had extended its operation into the heavens.

Kepler anticipates another major obstacle to the moon voyager when he observes that we agreed not to begin ‘until the moon begins to be eclipsed on its eastern side. Should it regain its full light while we are still in transit, our departure becomes futile.’ In other words, Kepler knew that once outside the protective blanket provided by the earth’s atmosphere, humans could not survive the resulting solar bombardment: the flight must begin at the critical moment when the sun is behind the earth or at a point directly opposite the point of take-off. During a lunar eclipse the earth’s shadow would provide the tunnel of darkness required to protect the vulnerable moon voyager; and it is not by accident that the maximum duration of such an eclipse is four and one-half hours, just one-half hour more than the duration of the voyage itself. A further indication of Kepler’s mastery of Copernican astronomy is his understanding that since the earth and the moon are both in motion, the shortest route to the latter would not be the straight line advocated by such ancient writers of mythology as Lucian, but a trajectory from earth to a point in space where the moon and the lunar voyagers would arrive simultaneously. Kepler possessed a keen grasp of the most serious obstacles to lunar flight and that even though those obstacles were beyond solution in terms of the technological equipment of his age, he believed it was at least theoretically possible – from a scientific point of view – for men to reach the moon. It is this attitude that sets Kepler apart from all the others who considered the possibility of lunar flight before him.

Upon reaching the surface of Lavania the voyagers are weary, but soon recover sufficiently to walk about. The Daemon immediately guides his charges to a cave in order to protect them from the penetrating rays of the rising sun. There they meet other daemons and have the opportunity to recuperate from the effects of their arduous journey before beginning a reconnaissance of the moon’s geography, flora, and fauna. They are informed by their spiritual hosts that Lavania consists of two hemispheres: Subvolva and Privolva. Subvolva always has its Volva (Earth) above which corresponds to the earth’s satellite, the moon, while Privolva is forever deprived of the sight of Volva. Taken together, a night and a day on Lavania are equivalent to one month on earth providing alternating two-week periods of intense, scorching heat followed by a cold unimaginable on this planet. The extremes of temperature in the Subvolvan hemisphere are mitigated to some extent because of Volva’s presence which has a moderating influence on the climate. Geographically, the surface of the moon possesses everything that is on earth, but on a grossly exaggerated scale: the mountains reach unbelievable heights while the fissures, valleys, and craters plunge to precipitous depths unknown in the terrestrial realm.

Kepler’s powers of scientific deduction were matched by a fertile and realistic imagination when postulating biological conditions on the moon. Although he was trained as an astronomer and mathematician, Kepler was too good a scientist not to understand that the dual effects of the lunar climate and the irregular, hostile terrain would produce plants and animals far different from those that inhabit the earth. He rejected the temptation, which others had not, of simply recreating a terrestrial civilization on the moon; for in Kepler’s Lavania there are no men and women, no civilization as he knew it. Thus nearly two centuries before Buffon, Lyell, and Darwin, Kepler had grasped the close interrelationship between life forms and their natural environment.

The ‘Dream’ itself concludes on p. 28. Pages 29-79 contain Kepler’s extensive justifying notes, written between 1620 and 1630 and of considerable scientific interest. These are followed (pp. 80-96) by the ‘Appendix Geographica seu mauis, Selenographica’, a letter to Kepler’s friend the Jesuit Paul Guldin (1577-1643) with notes.

The Somnium concludes (pp. 97-182) with Kepler’s translation, from the Greek text, of Plutarch’s ‘Concerning the Face that Appears in the Orb of the Moon,’ which probably dates from the end of the first century AD. “Plutarch’s treatise is something like an encyclopaedia of early astronomy, bypassing Aristotle’s mighty edifice but discussing some of Plato, even occasionally mentioning Aristarchus. Page after page, the participants debate in a lively manner questions like lunar phases, eclipses, the mysterious self-light of the moon (the reddish glow of the totally eclipses moon), the possibility of reflecting sunlight to the earth (the optics being handicapped by the strange antique view that we see by rays emanating from the human eye) and many similar problems. Nonetheless, the dialogue established, clearly in conflict with Aristotle’s system, that the spotted moon is a ‘second Earth’, somewhat smaller, but with a rugged, mountainous surface and seas between its lands. Possibly inhabited by living beings … Since this ‘second Earth’ is hanging above the centrally positioned first one, care has to be taken through ‘gentle rotation’ that possible lunar inhabitants do not fall down in our world … It is understandable that Kepler, always very interested in our Moon, thought about translating Plutarch’s dialogue into Latin and publishing it appended to his ‘Dream’” (Herczeg, pp. 593-4).

Most of the Somnium was printed in Sagan, both before Kepler’s death in 1630, and after his death, over the following two years under the supervision of his son-in-law Jakob Bartsch, who himself died in 1633. Kepler’s widow brought the printed sheets with her when she moved to Frankfurt, where she and her stepson Ludwig finally completed the publication. The first two leaves, on a different paper, and containing the title and dedication to Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse by Kepler’s son Ludwig, were printed in Frankfurt.

The Chillias logarithmorum contains Kepler’s logarithmic tables, constructed by means of his own original method. It was through the use of these tables that Kepler was able to complete his monumental Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627), the superiority of which “constituted a strong endorsement of the Copernican system, and insured the tables’ dominance in the field of astronomy throughout the seventeenth century” (Norman). 'Kepler had seen John Napier’s Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio (1614) as early as 1617; but he did not study the new procedure carefully until by chance, the following year, he saw Napier’s tables reproduced in a small book by Benjamin Ursinus [Cursus mathematici practici, 1618]. Kepler then grasped the potentialities offered by the logarithms; but lacking any description of their own construction, he recreated his own tables by a new geometrical procedure” (DSB). “In the history of logarithms, we owe to Kepler the development of an original theory for compiling logarithmic tables, the preparation and publication of his own tables on the basis of that theory, and their fruitful and diversified usage in highly important astronomical calculations [the Tabulae Rudolphinae]” (Belyi, p. 657). First published in 1624/25, this second edition of Kepler’s logarithms is identical to the first except for the title and dedication pages of the first part: the text on these pages has been reset but appears to be unchanged, except for the change of date on the title, the omission from the first edition of the phrase ‘Cum Privilegio Authoris Caesario’, and the addition of ‘Editio Secunda’; the Supplement is still dated 1625. Both editions are rare, but the second is rarer than the first – no copy has sold at auction since the Signet Library copy in 1960.

Two of the works in this volume relate to the collaboration between Kepler and Jacob Bartsch over the production of the Ephemerides. Bartsch was stimulated by the publication of the Tabulae Rudolphinae in 1627 to calculate ephemerides, resulting in his Uraniburgum Strasburgicum (1629). In this publication, Bartsch offered to collaborate with Kepler, and in Ad epistolam … Jacobi Bartschii, the elder astronomer accepts, outlines a research programme for the future, and recounts some important autobiographical information, such as his travels in the previous months, his visit to the Landgrave of Hesse and to his library, etc. As such it serves as an important biographical source for Kepler’s later years. The result of the letter was the joint production of the Ephemerides and Bartsch’s marriage into the Kepler family. Caspar notes that this work was actually printed in Görlitz in 1628, based on the date ‘Nonas Novemb. Anno M. DC. XXVIII’ at the end of the text. ABPC/RBH lists only one copy since the Honeyman sale in 1978 (Christie’s New York, 2017, a copy in modern binding).

When the manuscript of the Ephemerides was almost complete, Kepler asked Bartsch to travel to Frankfurt to discuss their publication with Gottfried Tambach. On the journey, Bartsch stopped in Leipzig to visit his former teacher, and Kepler’s friend, Philipp Müller, who suggested that Bartsch should publish some remarks by Kepler as a ‘prelude’ to the Ephemerides. “In calculating his Ephemerides for 1631, Kepler realized that the improved accuracy of his tables enabled him to predict a pair of remarkable transits of Mercury and of Venus across the disk of the sun. These he announced in a small pamphlet, De raris mirisque anni1631phenomenis. Admonitio as Astronomos (Leipzig, 1629). Although he did not live to see his predictions fulfilled, the Mercury transit was observed by Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) in Paris on 7 November 1631 and described in his Mercurio in Sole visus (1631); this observation, the first of its kind in history, was a tour de force for Kepler’s astronomy, for his prediction erred by only 10’ compared to 5° for tables based on Ptolemy, Copernicus, and others” (DSB). “In Frankfurt Bartsch had the ... small pamphlet printed again [as the offered work] in order to spread Kepler’s Admonitio in as wide a circle as possible” (Caspar 83).

The 1631 transit of Mercury was important as it supplied for the first time an indisputable quantitative measure of the apparent magnitude of a planetary disc. The Venus transit of 6 December 1631 was not observed, owing to the fact that it occurred at night for Europeans and, as the great English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks (1618-41) pointed out in Venus in Sole Visa (published by Hevelius in 1662), there were no telescopic observers active in the Americas. It was only in October 1639 that Horrocks realized that Kepler’s statement that after the 1631 transit there would not be another transit of Venus until 1761 was wrong, and that on 24 November 1639, as Venus came to inferior conjunction, it would pass directly across the solar disc.

Bartsch dedicated the first printing of the Admonitio to Müller. The 1630 printing retains Kepler’s text from the first printing unchanged, but adds a second dedication from Bartsch to Müller (p. 3) and expands the commentary of Bartsch from one page to three (pp. 5-8). Both editions of the Admonitio are exceptionally rare. ABPC/RBH list only one copy of this second edition (Christie’s, 1975), and none of the first.

The two remaining works in the present volume, the Eclogae and De vero anno, deal with biblical chronology. Kepler first became embroiled in the vigorously debated issue of establishing a correct chronology of events described in the Holy Scriptures through the fourth part of his De stella nova, published in 1606. “In terms of Kepler’s own scholarly effort, the appendix [to De stella nova] was the most important part. In its dedicatory epistle he spoke of entering a ‘chronological forest,’ and the printer seized upon Sylva chronologica as the running title. In 1605 Kepler had come upon a tract by Laurentius Suslyga (1570-1640) that argued 5 BC as the date of Christ’s birth. Noting that an initial conjunction in the fiery region, comparable with the one in 1603, presumably had occurred in 5 BC, Kepler drew an analogy between the nova of 1604 and the star of the Magi; following Suslyga’s arguments in part, he settled upon 5 BC as the year of Christ’s birth. (A similar adjustment is commonly accepted today for chronological reasons.) Afterward, Kepler elaborated his arguments in several works, including his definitive account, De vero anno... (1614)” (DSB). As the elaborate title, De vero anno quo aeternus Dei Filius humanam naturam in utero benedictae Virginis Mariae assumpsit (‘Of the true year in which the Son of the Eternal God assumed human nature in the uterus of the blessed Virgin Maria’), indicates, Kepler therewith intended to put an end to the debate. The work was first published in German in 1613; this Latin version contains new notes, which are incorporated into the text.

Completed at an earlier date, and with the dedicatory epistle dated Prague, April 1612, the Eclogae chronicae were not published until 1615, Kepler’s life having been dealt several serious blows, first through the death of his favourite son, followed by that of his wife Barbara a few months later; in addition, Kepler’s patron Rudolph II died in January 1612. The work consists largely of selected correspondence between Kepler, the German musician and chronologer Sethus Calvisius (1556-1615), Markus Gerstenberger, the Jesuit Johannes Decker, and Herwarth von Hohenburg, author of the Novae ... revocatae chronologiae ... capita praecipua of 1612 (for which Kepler also had provided calculations) on questions of chronology in the time of Christ. “The long dedication letter is very remarkable, in which Kepler describes in moving words the severe blows of fate that afflicted the state and his own family in the years 1610-1612” (Caspar).

In binding order: I. De vero anno. VD 17 23: 238418V; Dünnhaupt 2286, 27.2; Caspar 44; Cinti 47; Zinner 4471. II. Eclogae. BL/STC 17th-century German K-110; VD 17 23: 300231B; Dünnhaupt 2287, 30; Caspar 47. III. Chilias logarithmorum. VD 17 3: 306774D (erroneous collation); Dünnhaupt 2296, 45.I.2 and 45.II; Caspar 89; Belyi, ‘Kepler and the development of mathematics’, Vistas in Astronomy 18 (1975), pp. 643-660. IV. Somnium. BM/STC 17th century German K-120; VD 17 39: 122771R (only 3 copies, none of them complete); Dünnhaupt 2301, 53; Parkinson, Breakthroughs p. 76; Winter, Compendium Utopiarum 72; Caspar 86; Christianson, ‘Kepler’s Somnium: science fiction and the Renaissance scientist,’ Science Fiction Studies 3 (1976); Herczeg, ‘The habitability of the moon,’ pp. 593-602 in: A New Era in Astronomy (Lemarchand & Meech, eds.), ASP Conference Series 213 (2000); Rosen, Kepler’s Somnium, 1967. V. Admonitio ad astronomos. VD 17 23: 286808T (only 3 copies); Dünnhaupt 2300, 51.2; Caspar 83. VI. Ad epistolam Jacobi Bartschii. VD 17 14: 072950V (only 3 copies); Dünnhaupt 2300, 50; Caspar 80; Zinner 5141.

Six works in one vol., 4to (205 x 170mm). I. De vero anno, pp. [ii], 179, woodcut printer’s device on title (unimportant ink stains on pp. 172-174); II. Eclogae, pp. [viii], 215 (the oversized table on p. 111 cropped in fore-margin as usual with slight loss of text); III. Chilias logarithmorum, pp. 55, [56-108]; [2], 113-116, [2], 121-216, with one folding table and numerous woodcut diagrams in text (marginal paper fault on p. 193); IV. Somnium, pp. [iv], 182, [2, Catalogus thematum], with 6 woodcut diagrams and illustrations in text; V. Admonitio ad astronomos, pp. 14, [2]; VI. Ad epistolam Jacobi Bartschii, pp. 11 (overall some browning, but mostly light and much less than is usually the case with these works). Contemporary vellum (slight soiling, upper corner of front free endpaper excised). A beautiful copy.

Item #5326

Price: $185,000.00