First edition, first issue of this rare alchemical work, highly unusual for its early use of four-colour printing. Pantheo was a Venetian priest who published, in 1518 the alchemical Ars transmutationis metallicae. ‘Portions of this were reproduced in the Voarchadumia in 1530, but [it] is quite a distinct work and..... More

First edition of an Archimedean work by Galileo’s friend and early patron Guidobaldo del Monte. Guidobaldo’s Liber mechanicorum (1577), regarded as the greatest work on statics since the Greeks, employed the mathematically rigorous proofs of Archimedean models in investigating static and mechanical questions; the present work develops many of those..... 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

Scarce augmented edition of this work on the theory of machines and the nature of gravity by the young Jesuit Paolo Casati. The work imaginatively envisions a Latin dialogue between three great physicists of the preceding generation, all recently dead in the 1640s: Galileo; Marin Mersenne, his greatest champion outside..... More

First edition (? see below) of Becher’s popular alchemical handbook, which “rapidly became a standard text on elements, principles, and chemical processes” (DSB II.550) containing an engraved representation of the Prague Medal as well as a title engraving of the chemist with allegorical figures. “Becher’s views on chemistry have much..... More

Extremely rare copy of a classic work produced in 1661 during Japan’s intellectual awakening by the important mathematician Isomura Yoshinori (d. 1710). This much enlarged third edition (1684) includes new uses for pi, such as novel calculations of the surface of a sphere. It solves other practical problems, for instance..... More

Very rare first and sole edition of the first treatise published by the pioneering French mineralogist Jean-Baptiste Romé de L’Isle (1736-1780), and his sole work on marine biology, concerning the “movement, generation and nature” of the freshwater polyp. In the present work Romé hypothesizes, drawing on observations by the naturalist..... More

Rare first edition of this handsomely illustrated treatise on the cultivation and manufacture of linen, a staple of the textile and paper industries until the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney (a mere two years after this book was published) and cheaper methods of paper processing curtailed its..... More

First edition of an historically important volume describing the Dendera Affair, the Egyptian archaeological expedition of 1820 led by Saulnier, an antiquarian and treasure-hunter, and J.-B. Lelorrain, the master mason he hired to remove the bas-relief zodiac from Egypt’s Temple of Dendera and smuggle it to Paris. Until it was..... More