After nearly five centuries, Leonhart Fuchs’ herbal, De  Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes (Notable commentaries on the history of plants), is still one of the most beautiful books in the history of science. The 512 superb wood-cut illustrations set the standard for fidelity and artistry in the depiction of plants. Until the Renaissance, Western herbals were largely repetitions of the work of the first-century Greek physician Dioscorides. In 1530, Fuchs, also a physician, saw an herbal by Otto Brunfels and immediately realized the value to his profession of accurately illustrating and describing plants. His work not only surpassed Brunfels’, but achieved a lasting influence that still inspires botanists today. This Octavo Edition shows every detail of Fuchs’ herbal and includes an index of modern plant names linked to the corresponding woodcut. Commentary by Karen Reeds.

De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes (Latin Edition)

Arts & Photography

Fuchs, Leonhart

Individual Artists

Octavo

To read Shakespeare’s sonnets as originally published in 1609 is to come to terms with a rather different text than that found in the collected works. Here they stand alone as the verse of an Elizabethan poet, as a fresh and consistent body of writing. Although the book has been studied for centuries, its contents are still wrapped in mystery. The precise circumstances of publication may never be known: it remains uncertain when the poems were written and to whom, whether the text was revised for publication or even authorized, and whether its appearance was designed to tantalize a knowing coterie or delight the wider world with (as Keats wrote) "fine things said unintentionally." This Octavo Edition features beautiful images of the entire book, searchable live text, and bibliographical information. Commentary by Arthur Freeman.

Sonnets

Literature & Fiction

Shakespeare., William

History & Criticism

Digital Edition of original published in London, 1755. Includes searchable live text, commentary by Eric Korn, essay by Ian Jackson, provenance and binding descriptions.

A Dictionary of the English Language

Reference

Johnson, Samuel

Dictionaries & Thesauruses

Merry Wives of Windsor C. 34. K. 27

William. Shakespeare

You are about to open a book that revolutionized the art of scientific investigation. Robert Hooke was still in his twenties when he wrote Micrographia, yet in this single volume revealed the immense potential of a single instrument, the microscope, and the many brilliant speculations of a multifaceted mind. Micrographia introduces us to the living cell; to microscopic fungi and the life story of the mosquito; we encounter the two contrasting theories about the origin of the lunar craters posed for the very first time. We read the first sensible proposal for the origin of fossils, and an uncanny prediction of the artificial fiber industry in Hooke’s discussion of the spinning of silk by the spider. Elsewhere in his great book, gigantic insects populate the pages, and controversy and scientific argument mark out the text. Micrographia is a large book, measuring almost twelve inches tall and weighing three pounds. It was printed in October 1664, and when bound copies appeared on sale the following year it became an instant bestseller. Most people cannot relish the crisp printing and the fine paper of an original issue, and this digital edition brings the look of the first edition truly into the public domain. We can marvel at the clarity of the prose, and the vividness of the pictures. Many of the plates (like that of the stinging nettle, for example, and the louse) have a clarity not regained until the era of the electron microscope. It is hard to believe these are the images from a pioneer who flourished three and a half centuries ago. Commentary by Brian J. Ford, searchable live text.

Micrographia

Science & Math

Hooke, Robert

Experiments, Instruments & Measurement

Isaac Newton can be seen as a Renaissance colossus, a polymath straddling his age with one foot confidently planted in the Enlightenment and the other still mired in the Middle Ages. A firm believer in reason and the ability of human beings to understand how the universe worked ("the inward frame of bodies is not yet known to us," he writes in one place, with apparent confidence that eventually it would be), he also held some surprisingly reactionary ideas about God, and about how the truth of Holy Writ could be reconciled with Nature. A genius? Undoubtedly. The French philosophe Voltaire attended Newton’s funeral in 1727, later writing that "in a country where mortals are canonized, his discoveries might very well pass for miracles." It was in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that Isaac Newton's earliest optical paper was published in 1672. The result of experiments arising from Newton’s attempt to solve the problem of chromatic aberration in telescopes (he had been grinding his own lenses for nearly a decade), he concluded that white light contained all colors and that different colors were refracted to different degrees. His effort yielded a valuable practical result still in use today: Having determined that a very long ratio of aperture to length would result in spyglass tubes of unwieldy size, he solved the problem by inventing the reflecting telescope, described in Book I of Opticks. Commentary by Nicholas Humez, essay on the use of Latin in scholarly writing, searchable English and Latin live text.

Opticks (English and Latin Edition)

NEWTON, ISAAC

Language Study & Reference

Trattato delle Piante & Immagini de Sacri Edifizi di Terra Santa (Plans and images of the sacred edifices of the Holy Land) is a series of measured (exactly observed) drawings of buildings in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Cairo, executed by Bernardino Amico, a member of the Friars Minor of the Observance, between 1593 and 1597. The work was first printed in Rome in 1610 with engravings by Antonio Tempesta; a second edition, extensively revised by the author, was published in Florence in 1620 with etchings by Jacques Callot. Since the second edition represents the author’s final version of the text, it is the natural choice for reproduction here. Although the tradition of drawing the Christian holy places stretches back at least to 685 AD, the modern era in illustration properly begins with Amico’s drawings; no artist before him aspired to record Jerusalem and its monuments systematically and with topographical precision. Amico sometimes simplifies and alters what he observes, but scrupulously advises the reader of any distortion, as in Chapter XXXII, where he admits to "correcting" the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by substituting round arches for pointed ones. When the methodological investigation of ancient remains in Jerusalem began in the middle of the nineteenth century, Amico’s drawings were especially influential, and many scholars attested to his accuracy. Archaeological excavation in modern times has diminished the utility of the drawings, however, their value in the historical reconstruction of the shrines, and as witnesses to the former state of holy places altered and sometimes destroyed, has not waned. Commentary by Robin Halwas, searchable English translation.

Trattato delle Piante & Immagini de Sacri Edifizi di Terra Santa (Italian Edition)

Amico, Bernardino

The Manuale Tipografico of Giambattista Bodoni has been called the greatest type specimen book ever printed. Issued posthumously in 1818 at Parma by Bodoni’s devoted widow Margherita, the two-volume work contains a dazzling array of 142 roman alphabets with corresponding italics, numerous script and exotic typefaces, and a striking collection of flowers and ornaments––all beautifully printed on crisp, handmade paper. These typefaces and decorative materials were the culmination of more than forty years of assiduous devotion by Bodoni to the typographic arts, both in his capacity as printer to the Duke of Parma and as proprietor of his own private press and type foundry. Only 250 copies of this specimen book were printed, and surviving examples are now highly prized by collectors. The true value of the Manuale lies not in the fact that it is a splendidly printed and rare book, or even that it summarizes the life’s work of a celebrated type designer and printer who blithely sailed through some of the most tumultuous times in European history. Rather, its real significance is that from its pages speak the first successful modern types––more evolved, refined, and logical than those of Baskerville, yet not so chillingly formal and clinical as the letterforms of Bodoni’s great French rival Didot. Though Bodoni rarely made his types available to other printers, they came to have a profound influence on type design that is felt to this day. Commentary by David Pankow, searchable English translation.

Manuale Tipografico (Italian Edition)

Bodoni, Giambattista

Graphic Design

The Book of Mormon has generally come to most people as a surprise: to the farm boy beckoned from his sleep by an angel in the 1820s, to critics astonished that anyone would take the work seriously, and to millions of readers professing a personal witness that the book is not only authentic, but divine. It is unavoidably controversial and enigmatic, and if hundreds of millions of people have heard of this text, relatively few have examined it long enough to form an original opinion of what it may actually be. There are more than ten million Mormons worldwide, nearly half of them in the United States. Most of them have never seen this cornerstone of their religion as it was first published to the world. When a book is a foundation stone of faith, it will always be more than a collector’s item. As with many other famous books, this volume’s relatively nondescript mien belies the prominence which it attained. The Book of Mormon disappears comfortably on the shelf between other books of similar time and place until some unsuspecting browser turns the front board to reveal the famous title. There were works of equally imposing claim even in nineteenth-century America, and it would be unproductive to insist that this book is unique. Indeed, much of the Book of Mormon speaks not merely from its own era, but from its own decade and the very counties from which it emerged. This has been verified over the years in hundreds of texts examined and transcribed from the immediate world and culture of Joseph Smith. So when it is pointed out that the Book of Mormon also has its exceptional moments, readers of all persuasions may allow that surprises wait between its leaves. Commentary by Rick Grunder, searchable live text.

The Book of Mormon

History

Smith,Joseph

Americas

Areopagitica

When John Milton wrote Areopagitica in 1644, he was not making a contribution to the great debate on church versus state or the limits of toleration, except incidentally. Areopagitica was the result of the response to his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce the previous year. Advocating divorce seemed to strike at the roots of any religious society; it was universally condemned, and a divine of the Westminster Assembly demanded from the pulpit that Milton’s tract be burnt. The Stationers’ Company, less interested in theology than the preservation of the copyright system (Milton, like most of his contemporaries, had not obtained a license for the book), joined in the chorus of condemnation. In Areopagitica, Milton first of all defended himself and his right to express what he had written, and then he moved on to consider a new aspect of the problem, the rights of a book itself, independent of the intention of its author.  On the day the English Parliament abolished the Court of Star Chamber and the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission, freedom of the press, both as an idea and as a material fact, was born. It was to take some time to grow to maturity, and its first years were not without risk and dangers. Parliament had no intention of setting the press free––rather of transferring control into its own hands. But when it finally got around to tackling the problem two years later with the Ordinance of June 16, 1643, Pandora’s box had opened––political consciousness had come to the country, brought by the hundreds of books and pamphlets that had been printed in the interval. So not only did this Ordinance have little or no practical effect, it created a new and separate idea of debate among the mass of religious and political controversy: How free can speech be? It was against this background that Areopagitica was published in 1644.  Commentary by Nicolas Barker, searchable live text.

MILTON, JOHN

Europe

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