ARCHIMEDES Opera, quae quidem extant, omnia... Basle, Johann Hervag, 1544 1544
Folio (322 x 212 mm), pp. [viii] 139 [1]; [viii] 163 [1]; [iv] 65 [3, including blank]; 68 [4], printer's device on last leaf, numerous woodcut diagrams throughout; title slightly browned, otherwise very clean and crisp, an attractive copy in seventeenth-century vellum, edges gauffred and gilt, in a morocco-backed box £50,000
Editio princeps, the first printing of the Greek text, accompanied by Jacopo da Cremona's Latin translation (from a manuscript corrected by Regiomontanus). This is also the first printing of a complete Latin Archimedes.
'Archimedes - together with Newton and Gauss - is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians the word has ever known, and if his influence had not been overshadowed at first by Aristotle, Euclid and Plato, the progress to modern mathematics might have been much faster. As it was, his influence began to take full effect only after the publication of this first printed edition which enabled Descartes, Galileo and Newton in particular to build on what he had begun.
'Apart from one small tract published in 1503 and an imperfect edition by Tartaglia in 1543, the edition cited above is the first complete edition of Archimedes' works. The text is in Greek and Latin, edited by Theodore Gechauff, with commentary by Eutocius Ascolonites' (Printing and the mind of man). This does not make it clear that the 1503 and 1543 publications were Latin versions of only small selections of the Archimedes' ouevre.
Provenance: Pierre Daniel Huet (1630-1721), bishop of Avranches, with shelfmark and engraved bookplate recording the living gift of his library to the Jesuits, dated 1692; Jesuit order of Paris, with inscription on title. Huet, 'un des hommes les plus savants de France' (NBG), was an accomplished mathematician and celebrated scholar and author. He studied mathematics and wrote a critique of Cartesian philosophy. 'His great library and manuscripts, after being bequeathed to the Jesuits, were bought by the King for the Royal Library' (Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th edn).
Dibner 137; Evans 2; Horblit 5; Norman 61; PMM 72
£50000
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