?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 8,000
Kepler, Johannes (1571-1630) Ephemerides Novae Motuum Coelestium, ab Anno Vulgaris Aerae MDCXVII.
Linz, Austria: Sumptibus authoris, excudebat Johannes Plancus, [circa 1619].
First edition, large quarto, five parts in one volume, containing an introduction and ephemerides for 1617, 1618, 1619 & 1620, with divisional titles; general title very neatly repaired with slight loss at foot and blank top margin; bound in later full parchment over stiff boards; some faded marginalia; 9 3/4 x 7 1/4 in.
Kepler continued to publish Ephemerides in subsequent years. Collections of this span [1617-1620] exist in library collections, and others that contain the second part, spanning from 1621 to 1628, and a third covering 1629 to 1636. The verso of the final leaf in the present volume has a catchword, " EPHEM."
Kepler's Epitome Astronomicae Copernicae and Prodromus were published in the early 17th century and brought him great regard then as now. These ephemerides appear far more seldom on the market. The auction record lists a Sotheby's sale in 1937, and a record of the book's appearance in Lucien Goldschmidt's catalogue in the 1940s. "The ephemerides eventually produced [by Kepler] were for the twenty years from 1617 to 1636, and were published in three parts, the last two of them in 1630, Kepler having devoted the final months of his life to the task of getting them into print (he died on 15 November 1630). The Keplerian ephemerides were the start of a series that has continued unbroken down to the present day." (Quoted from Curtis Wilson's review of a new edition of Kepler's Ephemerides Novae Motuum Coelestium, in his works, edited by Volker Bialas, Munich, 1983.)
Ex libris Professor, Astronomer, Historian & Bibliophile Owen Gingerich.
