Opera per doctissimum Philosophum Ioannem Baptistam Memum patritium Venetum, mathematicharumque artium in urbe Veneta lectorum publicum. De Graeco in Latinum Traducta & Noviter impressa.
[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. No. 74 in the Roberts and Watson catalogue of the 2,292 printed books that constituted Dee’s library, the volume is the only book recorded to bear both men’s dated ownership inscriptions and the only Dee–Winthrop association copy ever to have reached the open market. Of the five Dee–Winthrop volumes so far identified, the other four remain at the New York Society Library; this is one of only two or three R&W books in private hands. The Opera prints, in Giovanni Battista Memmo’s Latin rendering, the first four books of Apollonius’s Conics — the editio princeps of any part of the work, and the treatise that gave the parabola, the ellipse and the hyperbola their names, unified them under a single generating construction, and established the geometrical framework within which Kepler formulated the laws of planetary motion, Descartes and Fermat developed analytic geometry, and Newton demonstrated the inverse-square law of gravitation. The Conics was originally composed in eight books and some four hundred and eighty-seven propositions. The first four, revised in the sixth century by Eutocius of Ascalon, were the only books to survive in Greek; Books V–VII were preserved in a ninth-century Arabic translation, published in Latin only in 1661 by Abraham Ecchellensis under Borelli’s editorial hand; Book VIII is lost. The Greek editio princeps of the surviving text waited until 1710, when Edmund Halley issued it with a conjectural reconstruction of the missing eighth book. Between Memmo’s Latin of 1537 and Federico Commandino’s far superior Bologna edition of 1566 — whose preparation Dee himself had seen at Urbino — the present volume was the only printed access to the foundational ancient work on conic sections. Tartaglia, Benedetti and (however critically) Maurolico used it; the sixteenth-century recovery of Apollonian geometry began here. Apollonius of Perga (c. 262–c. 190 BC), called the Great Geometer by his contemporaries and so renamed by Pappus five centuries later, studied at Alexandria among the successors of Euclid and composed the Conics at the request of the geometer Naucrates, dedicating successive books to Eudemus of Pergamum and to King Attalus I. Before him the three curves had been studied as distinct species arising from three distinct cones — the parabola from a right-angled cone, the ellipse from an acute-angled, the hyperbola from an obtuse-angled. His decisive step was to derive all three from a single double oblique circular cone by varying the inclination of the cutting plane, demonstrating that they were three manifestations of a single geometrical operation rather than three unrelated figures; the names themselves, drawn from the Greek terminology for the application of areas, are his own coinages and remain the standard terms of mathematics today. Apollonius’s treatise eliminated its predecessors. Hipparchus and Ptolemy absorbed his geometry into the astronomical programme that became the Ptolemaic system; the Arabic mathematicians — the Banu Musa, Thabit ibn Qurra, Ibn al-Haytham — preserved the books that Greek transmission had lost; Mydorge, Descartes, Fermat, Pascal and Barrow returned to him in the seventeenth century, their analytic geometry transforming his propositions into algebraic form. Newton’s reliance on Apollonian methods in the Principia is well attested. Poncelet’s revival of projective geometry in the early nineteenth century uncovered the relevance of Book III to the modern theory of conics. Every period of mathematical renewal in which the classical legacy has mattered has returned to Apollonius. Giovanni Battista Memmo (c. 1466–1536), the translator, was a Venetian nobleman who, after a long public career, persuaded the Senate on 8 October 1530 to establish a public chair of mathematics at Venice; on 17 October he was named its first occupant at one hundred ducats per year, and on 3 November he inaugurated lectures on Euclid at SS. Giovanni e Paolo. He belonged to a circle that included Pietro Bembo — who in 1530 wrote of his delight at the appointment — and Niccolò Tartaglia, who recalled discussing the squaring of the circle with him in 1534. The Apollonius was Memmo’s principal work; he died in 1536, and his nephew Giovanni-Maria Memmo saw the volume through Bindoni’s press at his own expense the following year. The dedication to Cardinal Marino Grimani concludes with the hope that by this edition Apollonius might be vitae restitutus, restored to life. The title-page sets a woodcut portrait of Apollonius within a six-block border ranging philosophers and scientists of antiquity in pairs around the margin, above an enclosed garden in the lower panel: an ornamental programme that itself makes a statement about the place of mathematics within the broader cultura filosofica Memmo was advocating. John Dee — mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, navigator, alchemist, and the most learned Englishman of his age — entered St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1542 at fifteen, was named an original fellow of Trinity College at its foundation in December 1546, and crossed to Louvain in 1547 to study with Gemma Frisius and Gerardus Mercator. The residence, extended from 1548 to 1550 for mathematical studies, was the single most transformative period in the formation of his library. On 20 July 1550 he reached Paris, where he lectured publicly on Euclid at the Collège de Rheims to an audience ‘so large that many had to look in at the windows’, before declining a regius professorship of mathematics worth two hundred crowns. Returning to England, he attached himself to the Elizabethan court, instructed navigators, architects and military engineers in the mathematical sciences, and contributed the cartographic and astronomical expertise that underwrote the English voyages of exploration. His Mathematical Preface to Henry Billingsley’s English Euclid of 1570 is the most important sixteenth-century English statement of the practical applications of mathematics. From the mid-1580s his energies were absorbed by the angelic conversations conducted with Edward Kelley; on his return from Poland and Bohemia in 1589 he found his Mortlake house vandalised and nearly nine-tenths of the books he had left behind stolen. The character of Prospero in The Tempest — the magician-scholar who commands spirits through his books and at the play’s end drowns them — is almost certainly Shakespeare’s portrait of Dee. He died at Mortlake in late 1608 or early 1609, in penury, at the house of his friend John Pontois. The present volume is the earliest dated example of what may be called the Louvain Core Group: the mathematical spine of Dee’s library, acquired during his Louvain residence and bound locally in a cluster of diagnostically similar bindings. The contemporary Louvain binding is of blind-panelled polished fawn calf over pasteboards: covers within a frame of blind fillets, a central blind fillet-lozenge, small floral tools in gilt at the outer corners, a small rampant-lion tool in gilt at the lozenge corners, and at centre the small blind tool of the double-headed Habsburg eagle that Roberts and Watson note on several of Dee’s Antwerp or Louvain acquisitions of this period. The spine, with five small raised bands, is gilt-tooled in the compartments with fleur-de-lis and dolphin alternately. Following a common Low Countries practice of reusing medieval manuscript waste, the binder pasted to the front and rear boards two vellum fragments from an earlier bookstock: the front pastedown a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century fragment in a Gothic textualis hand whose visible text is consistent with Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae, Question 95, on divination; the rear a thirteenth-century fragment of an Evangeliary with rubricated initials in red and blue and musical notation in neumes. The watermark on the integral front flyleaf, visible in raking light, is of the hand-and-glove type documented by Briquet in southern Low Countries and northern French papers of the 1530s–1560s; because the flyleaf is integral rather than a later addition, the watermark dates the binding event itself, independently reinforcing the Louvain attribution established by the eagle tool and the manuscript-waste pastedowns. Dee signed the title-page in his distinctive early hand — Joannes Deeus: Anglus: 1549 — and added marginal notes and underlinings throughout the text. The intellectual heart of the copy lies on the front flyleaf, which Dee turned into a double apparatus of unusual scope. The left-hand column gathers the names of mathematicians older than or contemporary with Apollonius, drawn from close reading of the prefaces to Books I, II and IV — Eudemus, Naucrates, Eutocius of Ascalon, Philonides, Conon of Samos, Trasydeus, Nicoteles — and extended to figures known from Archimedes and Eutocius’s commentaries, grouped under the headings Synchroni and Antiquiores. A separate section headed Ex Archimede catalogues the dedicatees and correspondents of the Archimedean corpus printed in the same volume: Gelon of Syracuse, Zeuxippus, Dositheus of Pelusium, Aristarchus of Samos, Eratosthenes of Cyrene. The two columns together constitute a prosopographical index of the Hellenistic mathematical community, keyed to the source passages in which each name appears. The right-hand column then marshals this evidence into a formal Ramist demonstration that Archimedes preceded Apollonius, set out in three numbered proofs with a stated objection — that Archimedes cites conic elements and thus presupposes Apollonius — and a reply, that Conon and others also wrote on conics, and that Apollonius is nowhere named by Archimedes. The page is spatially designed to be taken in at a glance as well as read line by line: a visual apparatus for historical reasoning rather than a discursive essay. The method is precisely the historia literaria that Anthony Grafton, William Sherman and Robert Goulding have identified as characteristic of Dee’s approach to the sciences. A further note at folio 18 verso reduces a printed proposition to its operative geometrical relation — Ergo bz est medium proportionale inter ze et zd — extracting the constructive core from the surrounding exposition, the same habit of mind that would later produce the condensed symbolic apparatus of the Monas Hieroglyphica of 1564. A bilingual parallel-text edition of the entire flyleaf apparatus, prepared from the autograph and from Grafton’s reading, accompanies the present copy. Dee’s flyleaf bears directly on one of the most important editorial projects of the sixteenth century. In the summer of 1563 Dee travelled to Urbino and called on Federico Commandino, bringing with him a Latin manuscript of Machometus Bagdedinus’s De Superficierum Divisionibus copied from his own codex (now British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. IX). Commandino took him into his study and showed him the editorial work then in progress on Apollonius, Archimedes and Ptolemy, a visit Dee later recalled at sig. *4 of the 1570 Pesaro edition of the De Superficierum Divisionibus. Commandino’s Apollonius, when it appeared at Bologna in 1566, carried a preface headed Ex Eutocio et Gemino that addressed the same question Dee had set out on his Louvain flyleaf thirteen years earlier — the priority of Archimedes over Apollonius — drawing on the same authorities and resolving the same objection. The 1566 edition also incorporated lemmas from Book VII of Pappus’s Collection as prefaces to the first three books, a late editorial decision that, as Argante Ciocci has shown, was inserted during a 1560–65 revision campaign falling within the window of Dee’s Urbino visit. Whether Dee carried his apparatus to Urbino or not cannot be determined from surviving evidence; what is established is that the two scholars performed the same intellectual operation on the same materials at almost the same moment. Dee later acquired the 1566 (R&W no. 145) and kept the superseded Memmo beside it; the working text had been replaced, but the physical volume he had studied at Louvain retained an irreducible personal and bibliographic significance. In September 1583 Dee sailed from England with the Polish nobleman Albert Łaski, carrying approximately eight hundred of his most precious books and leaving some fifteen hundred printed books and all of his manuscripts at Mortlake in the care of his brother-in-law Nicholas Fromond. The plundering began almost immediately. Of the roughly 2,292 printed volumes recorded in the 1583 catalogue, perhaps 350 have been traced, distributed across five distinct dispersal channels. The largest group — more than a hundred volumes at the Royal College of Physicians — passed through Nicholas Saunder, who concealed Dee’s ownership by bleaching, overwriting or excising his signatures and dated his own inscriptions variously between 1583 and 1589 to suggest piecemeal acquisition. A second channel carried a smaller group to the Stuart antiquarians — Cotton, Savile, D’Ewes, Digby, Selden, Ussher — via Pontois and the post-mortem sales of 1625–26, and thence to the Bodleian, the British Library, and the Cambridge and Oxford colleges. A third channel, to which the Apollonius belongs, consists of the volumes that escaped Mortlake cleanly: books taken in 1583 that show no Saunder intervention whatsoever and that entered the anonymous London book trade directly, their Dee inscriptions intact and undisturbed. A fourth comprises the books Dee himself sold in his post-1589 penury; a fifth, the far-flung survivals still surfacing in Cardiff, Edinburgh, the Herzen Library at Kirov, Stanford and elsewhere as institutional catalogues improve. The Apollonius is the type specimen of the third channel: the earliest dated Louvain Core Group volume, cleanly freed from Mortlake, and preserved with signature and annotations entirely in full. Between the Mortlake plundering and Winthrop’s London purchase the volume is undocumented — a forty-eight-year gap characteristic of the third channel, within which many Dee books passed quickly through the second-hand trade without resting in any single collection long enough to attract an intermediate ownership mark. By then Commandino’s 1566 had superseded the Memmo as a working mathematical text, and the 1537 edition’s value in the period had shifted from content to provenance. John Winthrop Jr., eldest son of the founding Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and himself the future Governor of Connecticut, bought the book in London in the first half of 1631, signed the title-page John Winthrop. 1631, and packed it into a barrel of books, chemicals, instruments and household goods shipped with him aboard the Lyon (Captain William Peirce master), which sailed for New England that summer and reached Nantasket on 2 November 1631. Among his fellow passengers was the Reverend John Eliot, the future Apostle to the Indians. The Apollonius is the only Dee volume that can be firmly dated to that voyage by Winthrop’s own hand; four further Dee volumes known to have passed into his collection — Paracelsus’s Baderbuchlin (NYSL Win 189), his Das Buch meteororvm (Win 188), Gerhard Dorn’s Chymisticum artificium naturae (Win 86), and a theological set attributed to Rivius — remain at the New York Society Library. In notes on two of the Paracelsus volumes Winthrop set down his explicit view that books bearing Dee’s annotations were the more valuable for those marks — a first-person statement of the bibliographic value of provenance that is the conceptual frame within which the Apollonius was acquired. Winthrop was one of the most scientifically active men in seventeenth-century New England: physician, alchemist, metallurgist, founder of New England’s first ironworks, secretary of the 1662 Connecticut charter, and on 1 January 1663 the first colonial American to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. His library, shaped by the reformist circle around Samuel Hartlib, Robert Child and his London agent Edward Howes, exceeded a thousand volumes by 1641 — the largest in the English colonies. Cotton Mather would christen him the Christian Hermes in book IV of the Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Winthrop’s addition to the Apollonius title-page of Dee’s monas hieroglyphica — the glyph Dee had devised in 1564 and expounded in a treatise of the same name, combining the signs of Sun, Moon, elements and fire into a single ideogram of the mystical unity of creation — is the first documented use of that symbol by any Winthrop. He placed it on the title-page between Dee’s 1549 inscription and his own 1631 signature, at the visual midpoint between the two owners; a second, smaller monad stands beside the inscription Winthropi on the recto of the front flyleaf. Over the next three generations the symbol became a quasi-heraldic device of the family. Waitstill Winthrop (1642–1717), John Jr.’s younger son and later chief justice of Massachusetts, used it on his own books after 1676; his son John Winthrop FRS (1681–1747), elected to the Royal Society in 1734, used it on his. A copy of Tycho Brahe’s Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica (Nuremberg, 1602) preserves both Waitstill’s and John FRS’s inscriptions with accompanying monads on the same page. The Apollonius title-page compresses the earliest link in that chain into a single surface: Dee’s 1549 signature, the 1631 Winthrop signature, the monad between them, and the later layer of Frederick Winthrop’s 1812 New York inscription — a palimpsest of ownership across two hundred and sixty-three years. The library passed to Waitstill Winthrop on Winthrop Jr.’s death in 1676, then descended intact through Waitstill’s son John Winthrop FRS and later generations until the decisive split of 1812. On 18 May of that year Frederick Winthrop of New York deposited approximately 290–347 volumes at the New York Society Library, where they were first recorded in the Library’s 1813 catalogue. The four alchemical Dee–Winthrop volumes went to the Library; the Apollonius did not. Frederick added his own dated inscription to the title-page — Fred.k Winthrop New York May 18.th 1812 — and retained the mathematical copy privately. The retention logic was substantive: the Paracelsus and Dorn volumes belonged to an esoteric programme whose relevance had narrowed to institutional study, while the Apollonius, with its Dee chronological apparatus and Ramist annotations, remained readable as a classical mathematical text and as a Winthrop family treasure of intellectual pedigree. The book passed from Frederick to the Charleston miniaturist Charles Fraser (1782–1860), who presented it to Robert Charles Winthrop (1809–1894), Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Senator from Massachusetts and the family’s self-appointed historian, with an inscription dated Washington, May 1850. It then descended through later Winthrop heirs to Goodspeed’s Book Shop in Boston, from which it was acquired in 1975 by Arthur and Charlotte Vershbow, in whose collection it remained until its return to the market. The 1537 edition itself is very rare in commerce: OCLC lists five copies in the United States (Harvard, Louisville, MIT, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Yale); ABPC and RBH together record only two other complete copies since the Honeyman sale. Dee-provenance copies are a different order of scarcity. Of the small number of Dee books to have surfaced at auction since 1990 — among them the Hardyng Chronicle at Sotheby’s in 2009 and a Viotti De demonstratione in 2006 — none carry the double Dee–Winthrop association. The most recent comparable, Dee’s copy of Sebastian Münster’s Chaldaica Grammatica (1527) in a modern binding and without significant secondary provenance, surfaced from the library of Owen Gingerich at Swann in October 2025 — a baseline against which the present volume’s contemporary Louvain binding, dual association provenance and two distinct manuscript layers of annotation can be weighed. Among the roughly 350 Dee books so far traced, this is the only volume to bear both Dee’s and Winthrop’s dated ownership inscriptions, and in its physical state — Louvain binding unrestored, Dee’s flyleaf apparatus intact, Winthrop’s monad undisturbed, all subsequent Winthrop inscriptions preserved — it is the single most completely preserved documentary intersection of two of the most important private libraries in the English-speaking world. Provenance: John Dee, philosopher, mathematician, and astrologer (ownership inscription dated 1549 on the title-page, Joannes Deeus: Anglus: 1549, marginal notes and underlinings throughout, autograph double apparatus on the front flyleaf: Ramist chronological demonstration that Archimedes preceded Apollonius, with a prosopographical index of ancient mathematicians drawn from the Apollonian and Archimedean texts); John Winthrop Jr., physician, alchemist, Governor of Connecticut, FRS (ownership signature dated 1631 on the title-page, John Winthrop. 1631, with the monas hieroglyphica; a second ownership inscription, Winthropi, with a smaller monad on the recto of the front flyleaf); by descent to Waitstill Winthrop, chief justice of Massachusetts (signature on the recto of the front flyleaf); Frederick Winthrop of New York (ownership entry dated 18 May 1812 on the title-page, Fred.k Winthrop New York May 18.th 1812); Charles Fraser of Charleston (1782–1860), presentation inscription dated Washington, May 1850, to Robert Charles Winthrop (1809–1894), Speaker of the House, Senator from Massachusetts; by later Winthrop descent to Goodspeed’s Book Shop, Boston; Arthur & Charlotte Vershbow, acquired 1975 (bookplate on the recto of the front flyleaf). References: Brunet I, 347 — Essling 667–668 — Hoffmann I, p. 205 — Macclesfield 171 (lacking two leaves of text) — Riccardi I, 147 (‘raro libro’) — Roberts & Watson 74 — Sander 480 — STC Italian 34 — Stillwell, The Awakening Interest in Science during the First Century of Printing, 139 — Wilkinson 11 — not in Adams; for the Commandino edition of 1566 see Horblit 4, Dibner 101, Norman 57. — Ciocci, ‘Federico Commandino and the Latin Edition of Apollonius’s Conics’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 77 (2023), 543–617 — Goulding, Defending Hypatia: Ramus, Savile, and the Renaissance Rediscovery of Mathematical History, 2010 — Grafton et al., ‘Passing the Book: Cultures of Reading in the Winthrop Family, 1580–1730’, Past & Present 241 (2018), 69–141 — Roberts & Watson (eds.), John Dee’s Library Catalogue, Bibliographical Society, 1990, with Additions and Corrections to October 2024 — Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics, 1975 — Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance, 1995 — Wilkinson, ‘The Alchemical Library of John Winthrop, Jr. (1606–1676) and His Descendants in Colonial America’, Ambix 13 (1966), 139–186 — Woodward, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676, 2010. Folio (303 × 203 mm), ff. [1], 2–88, [89] (of 90, lacking the final blank), Roman and italic type, title-page printed in red and black within a four-sided border of six different woodblocks depicting philosophers, poets and scientists from antiquity, with an enclosed garden in the lower panel; on the title-page a woodcut depiction of Apollonius with his mathematical attributes on a landscape ground; woodcut vignette of an enthroned pope with the letters ‘.S.’ and ‘.P.’ on fol. P5v; numerous woodcut diagrams in text; integral front flyleaf with watermark of the hand-and-glove type documented by Briquet for Low Countries and northern French papers of the 1530s–1560s, visible in raking light; first two leaves slightly browned, a few fingermarks. Contemporary Louvain binding of blind-panelled polished fawn calf over pasteboards, covers within a frame of blind fillets, with small floral tools in gilt at each outer corner, central blind fillet-lozenge, the small tool of the double-headed Habsburg eagle at centre (‘which appears on several of Dee’s Antwerp or Louvain acquisitions of this time’ — Roberts & Watson), small rampant-lion tool in gilt at each outer corner of the lozenge, spine with five small raised bands and gilt fleur-de-lis and dolphin tools alternately in compartments; front pastedown a fragment of a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century vellum manuscript in a Gothic textualis hand, the visible text consistent with Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae, Question 95, on divination; rear pastedown a fragment of a thirteenth-century vellum manuscript Evangeliary with rubricated initials in red and blue and musical notation in neumes; corners worn, spine defective at head and foot, front cover almost detached. Housed in a modern half-brown morocco box, the spine lettered in gilt on a red morocco label ‘APOLLONIUS OF PERGA DEE-WINTHROP COPY’ and ‘VENICE 1537’.
Item #5650
Price: $650,000.00
