EUCLID. [with] ARCHIMEDES.

£15,000 · Offered by Sokol Books

The superb binding bears the monogram and arms (a fess, two stars in chief, a crescent in point) of Louis Bizeau (fl. first half of C17), a prominent bibliophile of whom little is known (Olivier, Manuel de l amateur de reliures , V, pl. 486). Some of his bindings c.1645-50 have been linked to the same workshop as worked for Dominique S éguier (Quaritch, Examples of the Art of Book-Binding , 108-9). His books, like this, had ruled pages, gilt edges and marbled pastedowns. Excellent, well-margined copies, in fine impression, of Francesco Commandino s Latin translations of Euclid s Elements and Archimedes s opera omnia , with Commandino s commentary, the last two issued together. These texts provided the foundations of modern mathematics and physics. Commandino (1509-75) was a humanist from Urbino renowned for his translations of the ancient Greek mathematicians including Aristarchus of Samos and Pappus of Alexandria. Several of his Latin renditions of Greek mathematical terms, for which he relied on previous adaptations by Roman authors like Cicero and Vitruvius, became the standard. Euclid (4 th century BC) was the first to reunite mathematical findings from the ancient world into a coherent, bi-dimensional system centred on simple axioms of plane geometry, based on angles and distance, from which further propositions (or theorems) could be deduced. His Elements began with the crucial definition of point , that which has no part nor size and which is only determined by two num

• Binding: Hardcover

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