?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
Fernel, Jean (1497-1558) Cosmotheoria, Libros Duos Complexa.
Paris: In aedibus Simonis Colinaei, 1528.
First edition, second issue with title page reset; folio, title printed within elegant criblé woodcut compartment that features 8 vignettes of the sciences on the left, depicted as women, and their manifestations on earth on the right, depicted as specific men (for example Astronomia represented by Pythagoras); illustrated throughout with woodcut diagrams, some full-page; bound in full modern calf ruled in blind and nicely executed; (title page and leaves F1 & I3 with oval paper excisions and repairs, or some other artful maneuver, expertly done, likely removing a stamp; one text leaf with small repaired hole resulting in the loss of a few letters on each side; text leaves washed, with evidence of faded marginalia; bottom blank margin of final leaf excised and expertly repaired); 12 x 8 3/4 in.
Houzeau & Lancaster 2406.
"[T]he most striking feature of the Cosmotheoria [...] is the set of large woodcuts that show the epicycle-deferent systems of the five major planets. [...] Later textbooks such as Peurbach's usually included diagrams of these epicycle-deferent systems. Since the textbooks were octavo-size, the diagrams were small, perhaps two to three inches across. In Fernel's Cosmotheoria, which is a folio, the woodcut diagrams are fully 8 inches across – the largest I have ever seen – and truly elegant and lovely." (Quoted from the Linda Hall Library's Scientist of the Week article on Fernel by William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science: https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/jean-fernel/)
Ex libris Professor, Astronomer, Historian & Bibliophile Owen Gingerich.
