Trattato della Pratica di Geometria in cui oltre i principi di essa vi sono molti insegnamenti intorno alle varie Misure di Terre, Acque, Fieni, Pietre, Grani, Fabbriche, ed altro, seconda l’uso di Verona, e di altra Città d’Italia.
4to. (5) ff., 152 pp., with woodcut vignette on title and woodcuts in text. Bound in contemporary cartonnato (G-H signatures are reversed), a very fresh untrimmed copy, partly uncut. Immaculate.
Rare first edition of this illustrated handbook of practical geometry and surveying equipment. The engineer supplies a panorama of the instruments used by city planners and surveyors in the early 18th C for leveling land, measuring dikes and embankments, calculating elevation and distance, etc.
Following a primer on basic geometry, Perini proceeds to surveying equipment, first introducing his readers to the cross-sight, the geometric square, and the plane table (pictured on a tripod with a small alidade). A somewhat haphazard bibliography then follows, containing works on surveying and practical geometry by authors ‘both ancient and modern,’ though most are 16th and 17th C; these include Galileo, Niccolo Tartaglia, Cosimo Bartoli and Ottavio Fabri—with a nod to Fabri’s squadra mobile, or theodolite, the forerunner of the modern graphometer. The rest of the volume includes sections on triangulation, depth and volume in irregular solids, and leveling near waterways.
A practicing architect, Lodovico Perini (1685-1731) designed the Teatro Filarmonico and the Seminario Vescovile in Verona.
Not in OCLC. The work was reprinted in 1739 (Colorado, Adler, Michigan) and in 1815 (No copies in OCLC).
* Riccardi I.262.
Price: $1,650.00