LONDON.- Shapero Rare Books has launched its first catalogue curated by specialist Laura Massey who is heading up the new science department - Science & Medicine. It brings together over 100 landmark works spanning disciplines from anatomy and natural history to astronomy, genetics, and early computing. It's a comprehensive selection that celebrates the breadth of scientific inquiry across the centuries.
Among the highlights is the second edition of the 'first great general work on mathematics printed' (Smith, Rara arithmetica, p56) and the first printed text to set out the method of double-entry bookkeeping, leading to its description as 'the most influential work in the history of capitalism' and earning Luca Pacioli (d. 1517) the title 'Father of Accounting'. Furthermore, Summa de arithmetica, first published in 1494, is the first printing of any of the works of the great 13th Century mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, called Fibonacci (c. 1175- c. 1250), and of the author's friend, the brilliant mathematician and artist Piero della Francesca (1416-92). Pacioli came to Milan whenever he held the chair of mathematics from 1496 to 1499, during which years he lodged with Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and taught him mathematics. Leonardo owned a copy of the first edition of the Summa and he refers to it in notebooks, it was central to his thinking. This second edition is priced at £135,000.
Other highlights in the catalogue is the first edition of Introduction to Quantum Mechanics with Application to Chemistry by Linus Pauling and E. Bright Wilson from 1935. It's Richard Feynman's own annotated copy of the quantum mechanics text from which he taught himself the subject as an undergraduate at MIT. With ownership inscription, pencilled notes, and a hand-drawn bookplate—an extraordinary association linking one of the great minds of 20th-century physics to his intellectual beginnings and available for £37,500.
Another opportunity to learn more about Feynman, is a rare, complete set of student notes from Richard Feynman’s advanced physics course at Caltech, taken in real time by future NASA scientist Ray L. Newburn in 1954-1955. It includes graded assignments with annotations—an invaluable window into Feynman’s early teaching and the student experience of learning from one of the great scientific minds (£17,500).
A science catalogue must of course include natural history and the highlight is a first edition of John Gould’s masterpiece, Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of Humming Birds, complete with the rare supplement and 418 hand-coloured lithographs. A magnificent set from the library of the Dukes of Manchester at Kimbolton Castle, celebrated for its iridescent illustrations and status as the finest 19th-century work on hummingbirds (£175,000).
The catalogue also includes the first edition of the most important 18th-century English work on plants in a private garden, celebrating the famed Eltham garden of James Sherard. Johan Jakob Dillenius's Hortus Elthamensis seu Plantarum Rariorum (1732) carries and asking price of £12,000.
Other highlights include a rare offprint announcing the first successful cultivation of the polio virus in human cell cultures; a provocative Enlightenment work, a rare first English edition of the earliest European sex manual, originally published anonymously in French in 1675 and Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species.
As well as the first edition of the first computer manual, written for the Harvard Mark I. Largely authored by computing pioneer Grace Hopper, which brought Babbage’s analytical engine concept to life and laid the foundations for modern programming, the catalogue also includes the first and only edition of a rare Soviet photographic atlas of nebulae, compiled by two of the USSR’s leading astrophysicists. Prices for books and manuscripts in the catalogue range from as little as £150 to £175,000.
