RECORDE, Robert.

by Robert Recorde

£24,000 · Offered by Sokol Books

Very rare early edition of this most important mathematical work of the sixteenth century in England, with Record s dedication to King Edward, edited and augmented after the author s death by John Dee. It was the standard arithmetic textbook of the period, passing through numerous editions until 1673, long after the work should have been obsolete. Dee s contributions were of a practical nature, being sections on foreign exchange and on foreign weights and measures. Dee also added a long poem I.D. to the earnest Arithmetician in which he promoted his Mathematical Praeface to Billingsley s English translation of Euclid (1570). Robert Recorde s Arithmetic: or, The Ground of Arts was one of the first printed English textbooks on arithmetic and the most popular of its time. The first edition of 1543 was preceded only by two other anonymous mathematical texts in 1537 and 1539. Robert Recorde was born in Wales and attended both Oxford and Cambridge. Little is known of his early life, but records show him graduating Oxford in 1531 and elected a Fellow of All Souls College shortly thereafter. He disappears until 1545, when he graduated in medicine from Cambridge. Early in his career, he seems to have been physician to King Edward VI and Queen Mary. Two years later he had moved to London, and by 1549 he had been given the job of comptroller of the Bristol Mint. He undertook a position supervising the mint s silver mines in Ireland from 1551 to 1553. Evidently this enterprise was a fail

• Binding: Hardcover

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