Antiques Trade Gazette 23


unveil fresh horizons


and the end, and lacked the errata list found in fewer than a third of the 279 copies recorded in a 2002 annotated census compiled by Professor Owen Gingerich, Professor of Astronomy and the History of Science at Harvard, and author of The Book Nobody Read and other works on Copernicus. In a worn 17th century binding


of sprinkled calf, this Ritman copy – acquired at a 1983 Reiss & Auvermann sale at DM75,000 (then about £18,000) – sold in the end for a high-estimate £700,000. Just one copy has made more – the


example in the Richard Green science library, which at Christie’s New York in 2008 was sold at $1.9m (then £974,360). Once owned by the aristocratic


archaeologist, lawyer, politician and bibliophile, Nicholas-Joseph Foucault (1643-1721), that was perhaps the finest copy still in private hands, an unwashed and unpressed example in a simple period vellum binding, the wide- marginned pages retaining their deckled edges and exhibiting strong impressions of the text and woodcut diagrams. De nova et nullius aevi memoria prius


visa stella..., published 30 years after De Revolutionibus..., in 1573, is not as well known and is a much smaller work that runs to little more than 50 pages, but it is even rarer and again challenged the accepted celestial view. This little work launched the career


of the celebrated Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, for in it he demonstrated, without the benefit of a telescope but using a half-sextant of his own invention, a precisely observed and measured proof of the birth of a brand new star – a Nova or Super Nova – something unknown and, to some, unthinkable at the time. Brahe had first observed the star


in the constellation Cassiopeia, as the full title explains, on the evening of November 11, 1572, but contemporary reports indicate that it was at one time bright enough to be seen in daytime. Brahe went on to set up a private


press and print some of his own works at his Uraniborg observatory on the island of Hven but, according to his own later writings, only a few copies of his first book were printed in Copenhagen in 1573, and today it is reckoned that there are only around 20 copies in institutional collections worldwide, plus a couple in private hands. The copy seen in a 50th anniversary


sale held on November 28 by Bruun Rasmussen of Copenhagen was sent for sale by the city’s Tycho Brahe Planetarium, which is currently renovating its exhibition areas and was doubtless looking to boost its funds. Back in 1964, Rasmussens had sold a


Above: inscribed to Matthew Boulton, the title page of the Hutton Abstract... of 1785 sold by Dominic Winter for £43,000.


copy (bound up with another work) for DKr 71,000, but the only other example to appear in auction records for the last 50 years or so is one that in 1978 made £380 as part of the great Honeyman scientific library at Sotheby’s in London – and that copy had the last six leaves supplied in facsimile. This, it would seem, was one of


those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that major collectors (or institutions) are offered and the Danish saleroom’s estimate of DKr 400,000-600,000 proved an irrelevance. This little book, rarely seen but familiarly known as De Stella Nova, sold in the end to a so far unidentified “overseas buyer” for a stellar DKr 4.1m (£472,730). Tycho Brahe is one of the truly great


Left: the folding litho map of Ascension from Darwin’s Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands..., sold for $23,000 (£14,830) by Christie’s New York.


as Liber in judiciis astrorum, in a fine contemporary South German binding of blind-stamped brown calf with some brass fittings still attached, took €40,000 (£34,400). Rare copies of two volumes of 1672-


figures in the history of astronomy, but he is also remembered in connection with his nose! In 1566, while studying at Rostock,


he lost part of the bridge of his nose in a duel with a fellow Danish nobleman, and for the rest of his life was said to have worn a replacement made of gold, silver, or perhaps copper. When his tomb was opened in 1901, green marks were found on his skull. The very first printed book on


astronomy/astrology was an edition of the Astronomicon of Marcus Manilius, an early 1st century Roman poet, and at Christie’s on November 23, a first of c.1473-74 took £42,000. Edited and printed in Nuremburg by the German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Müller (also known as Regiomontanus), this was believed by the great modern editor of Manilius’ text, A.E. Housman, to be both earlier and superior to the Bologna edition of 1474. Its rarity is demonstrated by the fact


that many corrections made by Müller in this edition remained unknown to other editors and were not incorporated into the text until the last century. For all that, this copy has not proved


a good short-term investment. Bound in the 20th century in Italianate renaissance style, it was last seen at auction at Christie’s New York in 2000, when it sold for $110,000 (then £74,160). One of the more popular astrological


compendiums of medieval times was an 11th century text by Albohazen Haly Abenragel, or Abû ‘l Hasan ’Al ibn ar-Rijal, and in an age when astrology and astronomy were much more closely linked, even the great Johannes Kepler is said to have used it in his studies. At Reiss & Sohn on November 1-3,


a copy of Erhardt Ratdolt of Venice’s 1485, first printed edition of the work


73 that first printed Kepler’s and the German polymath, Wilhelm Schickard’s scientific correspondence with the philologist and astronomer, Matthias Bernegger, sold for €12,000 (£10,295) on November 25 at Romantic Agony Auctions of Brussels. These Epistolae discuss Kepler’s scientific progress, with frequent references to his researches with Tycho Brahe, and document the preparation of his publications, most notably the Tabulae Rudolphinae. Another of the three key ‘Heralds of


Science’ and “a turning point, not only in the history of science, but in the history of ideas in general”, according to Printing and the Mind of Man, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species… is a work whose significance and impact really needs no further explanation here. What is highly significant in collecting


and price terms, however, is the fact that a copy seen at Christie’s New York on November 15 was one of only two dozen or so recorded presentation firsts. There are no known examples of that


1859 edition inscribed by Darwin, but an unknown number of copies were sent out to friends and colleagues bearing the words “From the author”, perhaps added by one of publisher John Murray’s clerks. This copy showed some bumping,


continued on page 24 BUYER’S PREMIUMS


Brightwells, Leominster: 17.5% Christie’s & Sotheby’s, London: 25% to £25,000, 20% to £500,000, 12% thereafter Christie’s, New York: 25% to $50,000, 20% to $1m, 12% thereafter Reiss & Sohn, Königstein-im-Taunus: 16% Romantic Agony Auctions, Brussels: 24% Dominic Winter, Sth. Cerney: 17.5% Bruun Rasmussen, Copenhagen: 24% plus VAT


NB: premiums may not apply or have been set at different levels where prices from sales of previous years are quoted. Exchange rates are those in effect on the day of sale.


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