EUCLID - BYRNE, Oliver.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The First Six Books of The Elements of Euclid In Which Coloured Diagrams and Symbols are Used Instead of Letters for the Greater Ease of Learners. First edition of one of the most lavish maths books ever produced, with a visual style which presaged both Bauhaus and Mondrian's De Stijl movement. In her survey, Friedman deemed Byrne's work "a triumph of colour printing" (p. 19).Oliver Byrne (1810-1880) had been teaching mathematics for around 15 years by 1847 - experience which presumably informed his use of colour in the present edition. His central conceit was that geometry may be more easily taught if letter labels (Angle A, for example) were instead replaced with colour coding. The result is a work filled with geometrical figures where angles, lines, and polygonal regions are assigned one of the three primary colours. The work was among the few books shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851, where it was widely praised for its beauty and artistry. It has continued to garner praise: McLean describes it as "one of the oddest and most beautiful books of the whole century".These features came at a price, however - 25 shillings, making it around 12 times more than a normal black and white edition and placing it out of reach of most teachers. The technical difficulty of keeping the coloured shapes in register greatly increased production costs, and it was therefore never a viable book for cheap mass-production: by the time Pickering went bankrupt in 1853, almost 800 of the original

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.