Oblong folio [49.2 x 38.1 cm], (1) f. engraved frontispiece, LI engraved star charts, (1) f. letterpress index. Bound in modern calf and marbled boards, title and author gold stamped on spine. Only very minor rubbing to spine and boards. Engraved frontispiece a bit dusty, some marginal edge wear and edge toning to the plates, letterpress index with edge toning and a few marginal mends.

Rare first and only printing of the English astronomer John Bevis’s (1695-1771) legendary Uranographia Britannica [c. 1748], a celestial atlas of both high astronomical ambition and artistic beauty which was never formally published, its engraved sheets languishing in legal limbo, sequestered by the courts for some 35 years after the bankruptcy in 1750 of Bevis’s partner, the London instrument maker John Neale. “The Uranographia, if published as scheduled, would certainly have joined the elite ranks of the Grand Atlases” (Ashworth, p. 53), namely Beyer’s Uranometria (1603), Schiller’s Coelestum Stellatum Christianum (1627), Hevelius’s Firmamentum (1690), Flamsteed’s Atlas Coelestis (1729), and Bode’s Uranographia (1801), the fine ‘working star charts’ which were essential tools of astronomers in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. “No expense was spared in the interest of accuracy and artistic quality. The plates of Uranographia Britannica were beautifully engraved … It has been suggested that they may have been contracted to Dutch craftsmen, then recognized as being the best. The artwork was superb, far better than in Johannes Bayer’s Uranometria on which the plates were based” (Kilburn, et al., p. 126-7).

The volume’s 51 star charts are devoted to the 48 Ptolemaic constellations, with 1 plate of the southern constellations and 2 planispheres of the Ptolemaic stars – a distribution patterned on Bayer – to which Bevis added ten depictions of constellations from Hevelius and five others contemporary to the seventeenth century. He shows stars to the eighth magnitude and includes double the number of stars depicted by Bayer, some 600 more than Flamsteed, totaling over 3550 stars, all positioned for the epoch 1746. The atlas is especially timely for its attention to new categories of objects outside of the traditional ‘fixed-star’ designation, namely nebulae and nebulose objects, and objects that appeared, disappeared or varied over time (novae and extinct stars): “The Uranographia rather effectively bridges the gap between the ‘pure’ atlas of Flamsteed devoid of nebulae and variables, and the Bode Uranographia at the end of the century, with its plethora of non-stellar objects” (Ashworth, p. 71). The accuracy of star positions is on par with Flamsteed whose atlas was widely extolled for its precision. The Uranographia Britannica was also the first atlas to depict the planet Uranus (then thought to be a star) and the first to depict the Crab Nebula (M1), which Bevis himself discovered in 1731.

 At the foot of each engraving is an elaborate inscription dedicated to those who backed the project, including scientific luminaries from England and the continent, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and numerous members of the aristocracy. An official printed prospectus for the atlas survives (Glasgow UL, Sp. Coll. f465) and lists 181 subscribers. After the sudden bankruptcy of Neale in 1750, printing of the atlas stopped and subscribers were faced with a loss. It is known that the French astronomer Charles Messier (1730-1817) received a copy of the Uranographia Britannica before the project was halted (in his 1781 ‘Catalogue’ of ‘Messier Objects’ he cites it as “le grand Atlas anglais”), but almost all surviving copies today derive from the sale of the estate of Bevis’s executor in 1785, at which sheets of the atlas engravings were auctioned off in various lots. In 1786 a letterpress advertising sheet was printed to promote the reappearance of Bevis’s lost masterpiece, calling it the “Atlas Celeste”; this advertising sheet ended up bound into a handful of copies, leading to considerable bibliographical confusion by those who erroneously took it to be a title page (a title page was never printed for the book).Misinformation about the publication history of the atlas was rife before the two definitive studies of W. B. Ashworth, Jr. (1981) and of K. J. Kilburn, J. M. Pasachoff and Owen Gingerich (2003). “A typical surviving copy … contains fifty-one star charts and elaborate engraved frontispiece [an allegorical scene, likely depicting Frederick, Prince of Wales] but lacks a title page” (Ashworth, p. 53), as is the case here. The present copy is unusual, however, in that it also contains a letterpress index of the plates, although it remains unclear if this index was printed before 1750 or in 1786. Three surviving copies (American Philosophical Society, Chatsworth, and St. John’s College Cambridge) preserve remnants of Bevis’s letterpress text, giving a further glimpse into the impressive intellectual ambition of his atlas: “Not only did it seek to restore the celestial atlas to the high artistic levels characteristic of Beyer and Hevelius, but the Uranographia … had a scope exceeding that of all other atlases published so far, particularly in its [planned] integration of plates, catalogue, identification tables, and extensive annotation” (Ashworth, p. 73).

John Bevis, in addition to his work on the Uranographia Britannica and his discovery of the Crab Nebula, is remembered for being the only person ever to witness the occultation of one planet by another (Venus eclipsing Mercury on 28 May 1737) and for his assiduous editing of Halley’s posthumously published astronomical tables. Although of a cheery disposition and always active in the London astronomical community, Bevis is said to have become downcast at the mere mention of Uranographia Britannica. He died in 1771, 21 years after the sheets of his atlas had been locked away, reputedly by falling from his telescope while taking the sun’s meridian altitude.

U.S. institutions preserving examples of the Uranographia Britannica are the American Philosophical Society, Harvard, Stanford, Adler Planetarium, Yale Medical-Historical, Linda Hall Library, Detroit Public Library, University of South Carolina, Brigham Young, and University of Illinois.

* K. J. Kilburn, J. M. Pasachoff and O. Gingerich, “The Forgotten Star Atlas: John Bevis’s Uranographia Britannica,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, vol. 34 (2003), pp. 125-44; W. B. Ashworth, Jr., “John Bevis and his Uranographia (ca. 1750),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 125, no. 1 (1981), pp. 52-73.

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