Milestones of Science Books

APOLLONIUS Pergaeus.

Conicorum libri quattuor. Una cum Pappi Alexandrini lemmatibus, et commentariis Eutocii Ascalonitae. Sereni Antinsensis philosophi libri duo nunc primum in lucem editi. Two parts in one volume.

Bologna: Alessandro Benacci, 1566.

2nd Edition. Hardcover. Near Fine. Item #002668

Folio (310 x 210 mm). [4], 114; [2], 36 leaves, several mis-paginations. Signatures: +4, A-Z4 a-e4 f2; X2, a-i4, G1 missigned F1. Numerous woodcut diagrams in the text, decorative initials. Contemporary vellum, ink-lettered spine with calf raised bands (restored, boards and extremities rubbed, new front endpapers), blue-dyed edges, housed in a modern morocco-backed cloth clamshell box. Title somewhat soiled, light dampstains to margins of next 5 leaves, otherwise crisp and clean. Provenance: two old ink stamps to lower title. A very attractive, wide-margined and well preserved copy in original binding. ----

Horblit 4; Dibner 101; Norman 57; Adams A1310; Honeyman; Riccardi i 361; DSB I, p.193. - Important early edition, translated by Federico Commandino, of the classic works on conic sections. It was preceded by an inferior Latin translation by Giovanni Battista Memo, published at Venice in 1537. The first four books are all that survive in the original Greek; books 5-7 were discovered in an Arabic manuscript in the early seventeenth century and first printed in 1661. The present edition also contains the first complete Latin translation of the works of the fourth-century mathematician Serenus. "The most influential early edition of this classic work on conic sections, one of the great scientific books of antiquity, in which Apollonius introduced the terms parabola, hyperbola and ellipse" (Honeyman).

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