?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
Hooke, Robert (1635-1703) Animadversions on the first Part of the Machina Coelestis of the Honourable, Learned, and Deservedly Famous Astronomer Johannes Hevelius.
London: Printed by T[homas] R[oycroft] for John Martyn, 1674.
First edition, quarto, illustrated with 3 folding engraved plates; stab sewn and untrimmed throughout, with deckle edges, mostly unopened; final 2 leaves with large sections of loss due to bio predation (photo facsimile pages provided of these leaves); housed in custom clamshell box, 9 1/2 x 7 in.
Wing H-2611; ESTC R38964; rare at auction.
"Hooke counted devices [described in the present volume] among his greatest mechanical achievements. [...] What distinguished Hooke's instruments, indeed, was the fact that they were 'convenient and manageable,' together with the real advances they made. [...] The most spectacular of Hooke's complex scientific instruments, his equatorial quadrant, is described in detail -- with a glorious illustration -- in his Animadversions (the book in which he publicly attacked Hevelius's rejection of instrumental aids for astronomy.) [...] An equatorial quadrant allows the observer to follow the motion of a heavenly body by pushing his instrument around the axis: 'but Hooke goes further and has a machine do the pushing.'" (Quoted from Lisa Jardine's The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, London: Harper Collins, 2003, page 44ff.)
Ex libris Professor, Astronomer, Historian & Bibliophile Owen Gingerich.
