James Cummins Bookseller

London: Jacobi Flesher, 1653.

Price: $18,000.00

About the item

Secunda editio priori correctior. Four woodcut plates with black backgrounds, numerous illustrations. General title page printed in red and black. [16], 199, [1], [1]-50, [51]-173, [1]pp. Institutio Astronomica, Sidereus Nuncius and Dioptrice with separate sectional titles. 1 vols. 8vo. The Starry Messenger. Contemporary calf, expertly rebacked. Carli-Favaro 52 (241); Cinti 301 (155); De Caro 82; ESTC R506690; Wing G291A.

Item #345387

First published in 1647, Gassendi's important astronomical text book which outlines the various competing Ptolemaic, Copernican, Tychonic models, also includes printings of Galileo's Siderus Nuncius (the third overall edition) and Kepler's important work on optics Dioptrice. Wing does not differentiate the three editions with "Secunda editio priori correctior" and Morden imprint, as the present.

Galileo's seminal "Starry Messenger" (first published in 1610) was the first published scientific work based on observations of the moon and stars made through a telescope, notable for its four plates of constellations. "Through his telescope Galileo saw the moon as a spherical solid, mountainous body very like the earth – quire different from the crystalline sphere of conventional philosophy. He saw numberless starts hidden from the naked eye in the constellations and the Milky Way; there were far more bodies in the universe than had ever been imagined. Above all, he discovered four new 'planets' the satellites of Jupiter ... Thus Galileo initiated modern observational astronomy, which studied the universe as a physical structure" (Printing and the Mind of Man 113).