Super science books sale - June 17, 2008
UPDATE: The first edition Copernicus went for $2.2 million. Dalton’s book went for a bargain $18,750.
If you want to grab yourself a piece of science history you better get to New York on the double. Some of the most important books ever published are coming up for auction today.
Christie’s in New York is selling off the Richard Green library of what is, with amazing understatement, called ‘Important Scientific Books’. Described by the auction house as ‘a physician and amateur astronomer’, Green started collecting scientific books in the 70s. Boy did he build up a good collection (press release pdf).
The star of the show is a first edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, described by Christie’s as “arguably the finest copy in private hands”. With no hyperbole, this can be described as one of the most important books ever published, and the finest exploration ever of the phrase “the world doesn’t revolve around you, you know”.
The NY Times notes in a June 10 article:
Its cover is dented and stained. The pages are warped. You could easily imagine that this book had sat out half a dozen revolutions hidden in various dank basements in Europe.In fact this book, published in 1543, was the revolution. It was here that the Polish astronomer laid out his theory that the Earth and other planets go around the Sun, contravening a millennium of church dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe and launching a frenzy of free thought and scientific inquiry.
If you’ve got between $900,000 and $1,200,000 it could be yours. If that’s a bit rich for you a second edition is estimated to go for between $60,000 and $80,000.
More highlights below the fold.
There’s one of only 60 copies ever made of Galileo’s first printed work, a treatise on the ‘geometrical and military compass’. Listed at between $200,000 and $300,000. You could also get a first edition of his Sidereus nuncius for just $150,000 to $250,000.
First edition fans can also get Newton’s Principia Mathematica, for about $150,000. If you prefer your artefacts a bit more modern there’s a collection of 130 of Einstein’s offprints of his own scientific papers. You should be able to get that for under $250,000.
It’s not all books either, computing and cryptography fans can pick up a real Enigma machine for a few tens of thousands of dollars.
If you really want a thing of beauty, have a look at sale of perhaps the prettiest scientific book every published: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (see this very cool online version for a flavour).
The bargain of the show though if it only goes for its low estimate of $20,000 is the version of John Dalton’s A New System of Chemical Philosophy, they’re even throwing in a first edition of Dalton's “four essays on the constitution of mixed gases, on the force of steam or vapor from water and other liquids in different temperatures, on evaporation, and on the expansion of gases by heat”.
