Frankfurt: Paul Jacobi for Luca Jennis, 1618. First edition, extremely rare, of “the first book about the telescope, its invention and use” (Zinner). Written by the Milanese scholar Girolamo Sirtori in 1612, only four years after the telescope was invented, it contained a complete set of instructions and diagrams for... More about Telescopium: sive Ars perficiendi novum illud Galilaei visorium instrumentum ad sydera in tres...
Item #4706

Leiden: Ex officina Plantiniana apud Christophorum Raphelengium. Academiae Lugduno-Batavae Typographum, 1599. First Latin edition of Stevin’s extremely rare and important work on the determination of longitude using magnetic variation. Originally published in Dutch as De Havenvinding, “the [Latin] translation appeared almost simultaneously with the original Dutch version” (Crone et al...... More about Limenheuretica [Greek], sive porluum investigandorum ratio. Metaphraste Hug. Grotio Batavo
Item #3954

Cologne: Johann Birkmann, 1562. First edition of this exceptionally rare, interesting, and notorious work – the second printed work on magnetism, preceded only by the Epistola de magnete of Peregrinus (1558) (which is virtually unobtainable). Taisnier’s work, in fact, contains a plagiarism of Peregrinus, which it reprints verbatim, and of... More about Opusculum perpetua memoria dignissimum, De natura magnetis, et eius effectibus …
Item #4307

Edinburgh: Printed for the Society by Neill and Co., 1851. First edition, the extremely rare offprints, of these groundbreaking papers in which Kelvin outlined the view, as based on recent experiments by Joule and others, that “heat is not a substance [‘caloric’], but a dynamical form of mechanical effect; we..... More about On the dynamical theory of heat, with numerical results deduced from Mr Joule’s equivalent of a...
Item #4028

Kaluga: Kollectiv sektsii nauchnykh rabotnikov, 1929. First edition, very rare, of this extremely important sequel to Tsiolkovsky’s multi-part work of 1903-14 in which he first set out the basic principles of the construction of space rockets. In the present work, he made the crucial proposal to construct multi-stage rockets, which..... More about Kosmicheskie Raketii Poezda [Cosmic Rocket Trains
Item #4770

Rome: Bonfadino; Facio, 1604; 1606. First editions of these two rare and fundamental works on determining centres of gravity – these are fascinating copies with numerous contemporary annotations in an untouched contemporary binding. In these books Valerio transformed the Archimedean ‘method of exhaustion’ into a series of important theorems “so..... More about De Centro Gravitatis Solidorum Libri Tres. Rome: B[artolomeo] Bonfadino, 1604. [Bound with]:...
Item #4695