SAUVEUR, Joseph.

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Geometrie pratique. A meticulously constructed manuscript treatise on geometry with 27 hand-drawn and coloured plates, a fascinating example of manuscript intellectual culture in early 18th-century France. Joseph Sauveur (1653-1716) overcame a serious hearing impediment to make fundamental contributions in hydrostatics and acoustics - a term coined by him. In addition to his work on sound, Sauveur was a highly respected professor of mathematics at the Collège de France. Although he appears to have been reluctant to publish his work on geometry - as opposed to his work on acoustics - the quality of his teaching was widely recognised, and his literary executors observed that he allowed many mathematics teachers to make private copies of his treatises. These executors further specified that Sauveur never drew up plates for the Geometrie Pratique - unlike his other known work on geometry, which was explicitly intended for a younger audience. This copy, which carries 27 plates broadly similar to those in the published edition of 1754, was thus presumably drawn up at some point between Sauveur's death in 1716 and 1754.In the 1754 edition, the editor Guillaume Le Blond (1705-1781) clarifies that Sauveur's eldest son arranged for plates to be drawn up for the Geometrie Pratique, but that he died before he could do so, and that both the plates and the manuscript passed firstly to a friend, and then to him. This copy was presumably drawn up during this period of circulation. We have tr

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