Very rare first Latin edition of one of Sebastian Münster’s (1488-1552) earliest astronomical works, the Canones super Novum Instrumentum Luminarium, a treatise on the use of an elaborate device known as the Instrumentum Novum (‘New Instrument’). The volume instructs users how to calculate such astronomical information as the appearance of..... More

Early edition of one of the rarest 16th-century German-language instrument books on the construction of sundials. First published in 1539 and reprinted the following year, this is probably the third edition. All are very rare. Strasbourg imprints on technology are highly unusual, and in Chrisman's analytic bibliography of Strasbourg books..... More

An attractive and genuine example – with all volvelles present – of this copiously illustrated Paris edition (1553) of one of the most important astronomical and geographic texts of the Renaissance, Petrus Apianus’ Cosmographia. The work’s large, cordiform world map contains the most influential 16th-century representation of the New World..... More

Rare editions of the first printed star atlas and “the first handbook for stargazers” (Gingerich). The visual depiction of the night sky in Alessandro Piccolomini’s (1508-1579) La Sfera and De le Stelle Fisse, first published in 1540, departed radically from the anthropomorphized woodcut figures of individual constellations that preceded it..... More

Very rare first edition, second issue of this understudied work, “apparently the earliest Italian imprint to depict and discuss the Copernican system” (Gingerich) by the Cologne-born Professor of Mathematics at Padua. The work includes a printed diagram of the geo-heliocentric system of Martianus Capella (41r) as well as a diagram..... More

Very rare manuscript user’s manual for the famous terrestrial and celestial globes by the van Langren cartographic dynasty, notable as the first to employ the highly accurate star observations of the “tresfameux” Tycho Brahe – whose contribution is duly acknowledged (fol. 9v). Well into the age of print, these manuals..... More

Scarce first edition of Gilbert's only other published work, whose first section contains "an extension of the cosmological ideas Gilbert introduced into the last section of de Magnete; it is dependent on the latter work for much of its vocabulary and basic assumptions..." (DSB V.397). Posthumously published and edited by..... More

First collected edition of Galileo’s works, appearing only a year after his death and of great interest for his 17th-century reception: this was the edition in which Newton and later eminent scientists read their Galileo. Included here are not only most of the seminal pieces written and published over a...... More

Scarce first edition of Riccioli’s anti-Copernican, Tychonic geo-centrist cosmology, presenting an astronomy cleared (so he claims) of theoretical as well as observational errors. It is considered a conclusion to the Almagestum novum of 1651. “Riccioli described sunspots, compiled star catalogues, and recorded his observation of a double star; he also..... More

Scarce first and only edition of this work on Danish antiquities, of considerable interest for the history of astronomy for containing extensive material on Tycho Brahe and his island observatory. The fact that the astronomer receives such extensive attention in a work in which the spotlight would normally be focused..... More

Extra-illustrated and rare first and only edition of an unusual 17th-century treatise on the allegorical-mythological meaning of the constellations as conveyed by ancient authors, a work especially notable for its fine folding engraving of celestial globe gores derived from the design of Johannes Oterschaden (fl. c. 1600). The present copy..... More

Rare first edition, second issue (?) of this work on planetary astronomy and selected physics problems by the great Bolognese mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri, as edited by his disciple Urbano Davisi. The work first appeared in 1682 under a slightly different title, though as the collation of the body of the..... More

An intriguing collection of 8 very rare early English astronomical charts by the London cartographers and instrument makers John Seller (c. 1630-1697) and John Senex (c. 1678-1740), offering the most up-to-date celestial information then available, with several of the charts based on the recent groundbreaking observations of the English astronomers..... More