Pesaro: Girolamo Concordia, 1579. First edition, very rare, the Jones-Macclesfield copy, signed by William Jones, of the first modern theoretical treatise on the planisphere, an instrument for representing the celestial sphere on a plane surface. Guidobaldo was one of the most prominent figures in the renaissance of the mathematical sciences..... More
Item #5426

Palermo: Reale Stamperia, 1792. First edition, very rare, of Piazzi’s account of the Palermo Observatory, which he established, and where he made the observations that led to his discovery, on January 1, 1801, of the minor planet Ceres. Specola Astronomica includes Piazzi’s description of the astronomical instruments he had commissioned..... More
Item #3288

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

Leiden: Ex officina Plantiniana apud Christophorum Raphelengium. Academiae Lugduno-Batavae Typographum, 1599. First Latin edition, extremely rare, of Stevin’s highly important work on the determination of position at sea using the magnetic variation (or declination) of the compass needle, the angle between magnetic north and true north; since latitude was simply..... More
Item #5421

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