Oct 13, 2022 - Sale 2617

Sale 2617 - Lot 63

Price Realized: $ 531
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
Lowell, Percival (1855-1916)
Annals of the Lowell Observatory: Observations of the Planet Mars during the Opposition of 1895-5, Made at Flagstaff, Arizona.

Boston, New York, & Cambridge: Riverside Press for Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1898.

First edition, four large quarto volumes in original limp bindings, illustrated throughout, a very nicely preserved set housed in modern custom folding cases covered in attractive dark blue cloth with neat paper labels on spines and front panels of each, 12 x 10 1/8 in. (4)

Lowell did extensive work between 1893 and 1908 on his study of Mars. This work includes many images of Lowell's renderings of the canals on the surface of Mars, which he deemed, "non-natural features" that suggested to him the work of an intelligent lifeform. Lowell called the features "canals" because he thought they had been dug by inhabitants attempting to reach the planet's ice caps during a profound drought. Today, it is settled science that the features on Mars are not made by an intelligent form of life, and that the images Lowell spied through telescopes appeared as they did because of an optical illusion and other factors. Although Lowell's work on Mars failed to give much to astronomy, his imaginative interpretations did inform science fiction. Beginning with H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds in 1898, the image aliens fleeing a dying Mars and striking out into the universe to save themselves through desperate measures entered the collective imagination and fueled dozens of other works of fiction, including Heinlein's Red Planet, Burroughs' The God of Mars, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, and others.