Nuremberg: Jo. Stuchs, 1514. First edition of Werner’s “most famous work on astronomy and geography” (MacTutor), an extremely rare and highly influential work on cartography and navigation, notable for several ‘firsts’: it contains the first published direct translation of any part of Ptolemy’s Geography from the original Greek; the first..... More
Item #3080

Basel: [colophon:] Heinrich Petri & Peter Perna, 1561. Second, much augmented, edition of “the first systematic treatise on plane and spherical trigonometry to be published in Europe” (Rose, p. 99), completed by 1464 but first published in 1533 at Nuremberg by Johann Schöner. “Regiomontanus’s monumental work on Triangles, the first..... More
Item #2852

Venice: Erhard Ratdolt, 1482. First printing, rare, of this assembly of basic texts of pre-Copernican astronomy, an exceptional copy in an untouched contemporary binding (this book, and its several fifteenth-century reprints, are almost always found in 19th or 20th century bindings). Sacrobosco’s De sphaera mundi (editio princeps 1472) was the..... More
Item #3949

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
Item #4706

St. Petersburg: E. L. Porokhovshchikov, 1903. First edition, extraordinarily rare, of the first published work on space rockets, preceding by 16 years the first publication on rockets by Robert Goddard and by 20 years that of Hermann Oberth. In his bibliography of works on spaceflight, NASA engineer Michael L. Ciancone..... More
Item #4929

Cölln an der Spree: Martin Guthius, 1618. First edition, exceptionally rare, of the book that introduced logarithms to Continental Europe; in particular, it was through this work that Johannes Kepler, in ‘a happy calamity,’ as he called it, became aware of Napier’s epoch-making work, a discovery that enabled him to..... More
Item #4862