Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1693. First edition of this superb collection of thirty-one treatises by the leading scientists of seventeenth-century France, almost all of which are published here for the first time. This is one of the earliest important publications of the Académie des Sciences, and one of the most magnificent..... More
Item #4565

Antwerp: Plantin Press for the widow and sons of Jan Moretus, 1613. First edition, and a fine copy, of this great Jesuit treatise on optics, with engraved allegorical frontispiece and exquisite headpieces designed by Peter Paul Rubens. “A master treatise on optics that synthesized the works of Euclid, Ibn al-Haytham..... More
Item #4987

Paris: David l’ainé, 1743. First edition of one of the classics in the history of science, d’Alembert’s formalization of the new science of mechanics. “The ‘Treatise on Dynamics’ was d’Alembert’s first major book and it is a landmark in the history of mechanics. It reduces the laws of the motion..... More
Item #5878

Upsalla: W. Schultz, 1868. First edition, a very fine copy in unrestored original printed wrappers, and rare thus, of one of the founding works of spectroscopy in which Ångström demonstrated the presence of hydrogen and a number of other elements in the sun; the atlas contains his great map of..... More
Item #4831

London: Joannem Billium, 1620. First edition, first issue, of Bacon’s plan for the total reconstruction of human knowledge on experimental and inductive foundations — the Devonshire–Horblit–Garden copy, and one of approximately fifteen copies printed on large paper with the crown watermark. Of the six parts projected, only the first two..... More
Item #5962

Basel: Frederick Lüdi, [1719]. First edition, extremely rare, and a presentation copy from Nicolaus I Bernoulli to James Stirling, of this dissertation which describes Johann I Bernoulli’s two decades of work on ‘barometric light’ – the discovery of this phenomenon revealed the possibility of electric lighting. One of the foremost..... More
Item #6608

Lausanne & Geneva: Marci-Michaelis Bousquet, 1742. REVISE First edition, the exceptionally fine Honeyman copy, complete with both portraits (often lacking), of the collected works of Johann I (Jean) Bernoulli. Virtually all of Bernoulli’s work was published in journals. “The first edition of Jean Bernoulli’s collected works brings together 189 of..... More
Item #6399

Basel & London: 1729–1733. A four-document mathematical dossier, descended in the Stirling family at Garden, Stirlingshire, from the eighteenth century down to the present generation. It preserves, in a single file, the full three-way exchange between Bernoulli in Basel, James Stirling in London, and John Machin in London from December..... More
Item #6656

Paris: Typographia Regia, 1693. First edition, the Stanhope copy, of this collection of early Greek writings on technology (especially military technology) and hydrostatics. It contains several treatises on the mechanics and siege operations, or poliorcetica, used in the Hellenistic period (the period between Alexander and Augustus), including the construction and..... More
Item #4930

[Wien: K.K. Hof und Staatsdruckerei, 1868]. First edition, extremely rare offprint, of one of Boltzmann’s most important papers, in which he derives the ‘Boltzmann distribution,’ and formulates it as a probability distribution defined over phase space, instead of the space of molecular velocities – “This is the first occasion where..... More
Item #5812

Bologna: Giacopo Monti, 1667. First edition, an extraordinary association copy, of the first published book on the laws of percussion, and containing important hitherto unpublished material from the lectures of Galileo and Torricelli. This copy was a gift from Prince Leopold of Tuscany, Borelli’s patron at the Tuscan court. Probably..... More
Item #3935

Florence: Ex Typographia S M D, 1666. First edition, very rare, and an exceptionally fine copy, of Borelli’s important work on celestial mechanics, prefiguring the Newtonian theory of universal attraction. Borelli revived “Kepler’s theories on the planetary orbits … However, unlike Kepler, he believes natural motion to be in a...... More
Item #5221

Paris: Claude Jombert, 1729. First edition of the founding work of photometry. “[Bouguer’s] interest in the measurement of light dates from about 1721, when J. J. d’Ortous de Mairan proposed a problem that necessitated a knowledge of the relative amount of light from the sun at two altitudes. Bouguer succeeded..... More
Item #5828