Euclid | The Norman copy of one of the most influential, enduring, and beautiful books in the history of science, Venice, 1482

Euclid

Elementa geometriae (Latin, translated by Adelard of Bath, edited and with commentary by Campanus of Novara). Venice: Erhard Ratdolt, 25 May 1482

Chancery folio (307 x 211 mm). Gothic types with some roman, 45 lines plus headline. Collation: a¹⁰ b-r⁸: 138 leaves (r8 blank). Fine white-on-black ornamental woodcut initials (15 ten-line and numerous five-line), three-part white-on-black woodcut border (a2r), more than 500 marginal typemetal diagrams (all fully surviving the binder's knife), red printing (heading, a2r); some minor marginal staining to the first two leaves. Retrospective blind-stamped pigskin over wooden boards, by Sangorski and Sutcliffe; extremities very slightly scuffed. Buckram slipcase.

First edition of the “oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today” (Printing and the Mind of Man) and “a monument of typography” (Kelly). Campanus’s recension of the Elements, whose earliest witness is a manuscript dated 1259, became the standard version of the high and late Middle Ages. It was based on but enlarged from the translation from the Arabic made by Adelard of Bath about one hundred twenty years earlier, the so-called Adelard version II. Campanus's recension continued to be printed at least as late as 1558. Books I–XIII are the Elementa proper; book XIV is the supplement of Hypsicles of Alexandria (2nd century B.C.), and XV the supplement assigned to the school of Isidore of Miletos, architect of Hagia Sophia (6th century A.D.). Goff, GW, and most of the other standard incunable literature have given to Campanus an apocryphal forename, Johannes.

Ratdolt's Euclid was the first substantial mathematical work to be printed, and is one of his technically most advanced and accomplished productions. His dedication to the doge of Venice expresses his amazement that hitherto no major work of mathematics had been printed in Venice, the reason being the difficulty of supplying the diagrams without which much of mathematics, and especially geometry, can hardly be understood. He points out that, by his own invention, he has been able to remedy this, so that diagrams can now be printed “as easily as letters.” These diagrams have traditionally been identified as woodcuts (BMC, GW), but it seems much more probable that they were in fact cast in typemetal. Kelly notes that Ratdolt’s geometric diagrams “are so finely wrought that the method of manufacture still baffles historians of printing.”

Euclid's Elements is the only writing of classical antiquity to have a continuous history of textbook use from the pre-Christian era to the twentieth century. Sir Thomas Heath, historian of ancient Greek mathematics and editor of a twentieth-century edition, wrote in The Legacy of Greece, “No work presumably, except the Bible, has had such a reign; and future generations will come back to it again and again as they tire of the variegated substitutes for it, and the confusion arising from their bewildering multiplicity.”

A fine, wide-margined copy of one of the most influential, enduring, and beautiful books in the history of science.

REFERENCES

BMC V 285 (IB.20513); Goff E113; GW 9428; ISTC ie00113000; Dibner, Heralds 100; Grolier/Horblit 27; Grolier/Kelly, 4; Norman 729; Printing and the Mind of Man 25; Stillwell, Science 163; Thomas-Stanford 1a. NB: In quire a, sheets 2–5 are in the corrected, or variant, setting (conforming to the Gesamtkatalog main entry), most easily identified by the absence of headlines. This setting includes a number of diagrams missing from the first setting.

PROVENANCE

Cremona, Augustinians, for use of Frater Johannes Gabr and Frater Basilius de Ripa (contemporary inscriptions on dedication page, a1v) — H. C. Hoskier (inscription, February 1903, on front binder’s blank) — Charles Lemuel Nichols (bookplate) — Haskell Norman (bookplate; Christie’s New York, 18 March 1998, lot 83)