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Priceless Science: Striking Finds From a Rare-Book Fair

There are places where open flames are particularly frowned upon. A textile mill or a stationery store, for instance. And then there are places where the mere mention of a flame, fire, spark, smoke or ember elicits pandemonium. The San Francisco Antiquarian Book, Print and Paper Fair, held earlier this month, would be such a place. In a building stretching one square block sat some of the rarest texts, maps and manuscripts in the world, precariously flammable, and indubitably expensive.

Particularly fetching among these cultural treasures were the scientific tomes — works of biology, astronomy, chemistry and the like — which dealers proudly displayed with the most enticing illustration forward. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the models on the car lot with their hoods popped open, only with more flammability and much more intellect. From Audubon’s The Birds of America, a first edition of which sold last month at auction for $7.9 million, to Copernicus’ heliocentric sketch that changed the world, we’ve selected the most remarkable works the fair had to offer.

1. Anatomy of Plants(1681)

by Nehemiah Grew

If family names are derived from occupations, Nehemiah Grew’s ancestors must have been just as excited about plants as he was. His landmark work Anatomy of Plants was the first to note that a plant’s stamen is a male organ, with pollen being the seed. The text is also remarkable in its unprecedented detail, as seen above, with Grew even getting down into the first microscopic descriptions of pollen.

Owner: Liber Antiquus, Washington, D.C.

2. Theatrum Italiae(1663)

by Joan Blaeu

Moving is never easy, and moving is especially difficult when you own a 327-ton Egyptian obelisk and you want it shifted 275 yards to sit right in front of the Vatican. Such was the task assigned to Italian engineer Domenico Fontana in 1586 and detailed in this illustration from Joan Blaeu’s Theatrum Italiae(see a high-res version here). Enlisting some 900 men and 75 horses, it took Fontana a year to move the 83-foot obelisk.

Says the book’s owner, Paul Dowling: “People look at the 16th century and they look at the development of architecture and the arts and they see it as art and visually stimulating, but very rarely do they see the great technological advances that allowed the things to actually come to fruition…. It’s reminiscent of things like Apple. It’s great design, but there’s an incredible technological layer underlying it. ”

Liber Antiquus, Washington, D.C.

3. Ornithology(1678)

by Francis Willughby

Together with his mentor John Ray, the father of English natural history, Francis Willughby toured Europe for three years to gather material for this, the modestly named Ornithology. When Willughby succumbed to pleurisy during its compilation, Ray picked up the project, publishing the gorgeous work in Latin in 1676 and in English two years later. It was the first study to organize birds by their characteristics, leading distinguished zoologist Alfred Newton to call it “the foundation of scientific Ornithology.”

Owner: Liber Antiquus, Washington, D.C.

4. Cursus Mathematicus(1690)

by William Leybourn

A compendium of British mathematician William Leybourn’s writings, Cursus Mathematicus was aimed at the popular market (particularly for “a dull solitude or vacancy of Business,” as the author put it), as opposed to scholars. It was this book that James Logan, the early American scientist and mentor to Benjamin Franklin, used to teach himself math. The illustration above is a product of a century that saw the introduction of the telescope, affording the first detailed looks at our trusty satellite. We wouldn’t glimpse the far side of the moon, however, until 1959.

Owner: Antiquariat Botanicum, Lynden, Washington