907J Gassendi, Pierre (1592-1655); Galilei, Galileo (1564-1642); Kepler, Johannes (1571-1630

Petri Gassendi Institutio Astronomica: Juxta Hypotheseis tam Veterum quàm Recentiorum. Cui accesserunt Galilei Galilei Nuncius Sidereus; et Johannis Kepleri Dioptrice. Tertia editio prioribus Correctior.

London: Jacob Flesher for William Morden, 1653.                                          $12,000

Cover page of 'Institutio Astronomica' by Pierre Gassendi, featuring handwritten notes and annotations in the margins.

Octavo: 18.3 x 11.8 cm. 3 parts in one volume: [16], 199, [1]; 173, [1] p., 4 leaves of plates. Signatures: A-N8, O4; A-L8(including the final blank leaf). SECOND EDITION THUS, Fourth edition overall of Gassendi. .  Bound in 17th century English calf boards with an expert rebacking back fly leaf with contemporary notes; sewing renewed,  with spine label. The internal text is very generally clean and crisp with only slight aging.  The first title page is printed in red and black. Galileo’s “Sidereus Nuncius” and Kepler’s “Dioptrice” are introduced by separate title pages. There are several 17th century inscriptions of members of the Holden family on title page regarding ownership of the book, including John and Obadiah; This copy is Ex libris Professor, Astronomer, Historian & Bibliophile Owen Gingerich. 

The text is illustrated with astronomical woodcuts including images of the moon, showing its uneven, mountainous surface as discerned by Galileo through the telescope and four full-paged woodcut illustrations of stars (the Pleiades, Orion’s belt, the Praesepe and Orion Nebulas.)              

Illustration of the Orion constellation with stars depicted on a dark background, accompanied by the title in Latin.

Gassendi’s “Institutio Astronomica,” has been called the first modern astronomy textbook. It is divided into three sections: the first details the so-called theory of the spheres, the second describes astronomical theory, and the third discusses the conflicting ideas of Brahe and Copernicus.

This edition is important for the inclusion of two seminal works of telescopic astronomy: Galileo’s “Sidereus Nuncius” (first ed. Venice, 1610), in which announces his discovery of Jupiter’s moons, and Kepler’s “Dioptrice” (first ed. Augsburg, 1611), Kepler’s brilliant explanation of how the telescope works . Galileo’s Discoveries with the Telescope:”Galileo’s ‘Starry Messenger’ contains some of the most important discoveries in scientific literature. Learning in the summer of 1609 that a device for making distant objects seem close and magnified had been brought to Venice from Holland, Galileo soon constructed a spy-glass of his own which he demonstrated to the notables of the Venetian Republic, thus earning a large increase in his salary as professor of mathematics at Padua. Within a few months he had a good telescope, magnifying to 30 diameters, and was in full flood of astronomical observation.

Using telescope lenses provided by Galileo Galilei, Pierre Gassendi carried out a series of important astronomical observations that helped confirm the validity of Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. In 1631 he successfully observed the transit of Mercury across the face of the sun, providing striking observational evidence for the Copernican system. Gassendi also rejected astrology as lacking empirical foundation, positioning himself firmly within the emerging experimental and observational sciences of the seventeenth century.
This edition represents the first appearance in England of all three works collected here. Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius—first published in Venice in 1610 and presented here in its third edition—is also the first English printing of any of Galileo’s works. In the Starry Messenger, Galileo announced the astonishing discoveries he made with the telescope he developed in 1609. He described the moon not as a perfect crystalline sphere, but as a rugged terrestrial body marked by mountains and valleys; revealed innumerable stars invisible to the naked eye; and most famously identified four satellites orbiting Jupiter, demonstrating that not all heavenly bodies revolved around the earth. These observations gave dramatic new support to the Copernican understanding of the cosmos.
Gassendi’s Institutio astronomica, first published in 1647, quickly became one of the most influential astronomical textbooks of the seventeenth century, especially in English universities. Divided into three sections, it first explains the traditional theory of the spheres, then surveys astronomical principles more broadly, and finally compares the competing cosmological systems of Tycho Brahe and Copernicus. The inclusion here of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius together with Kepler’s Dioptrice—the foundational theoretical explanation of the telescope and optical lenses—makes this collected edition an especially important landmark in the history of observational astronomy and early modern science.

An open book displaying two illustrations of celestial bodies, with detailed engravings showing their surfaces, alongside text in Latin discussing observational astronomy.

Through his telescope Galileo saw the moon as a spherical, solid, mountainous body very like the earth- quite different from the crystalline sphere of conventional philosophy. He saw numberless stars hidden from the naked eye in the constellations and the Milky Way.Above all, he discovered four new ‘planets’, the satellites of Jupiter that he called (in honor of his patrons at Florence) the Medicean stars. Thus Galileo initiated modern observational astronomy and announced himself as a Copernican. (Printing and the Mind of Man)

An intricate vintage astrolabe illustration depicting celestial spheres, including lines for meridians, horizons, and tropics, with labels in Latin.
An illustration of the Pleiades constellation, featuring a dark background with scattered stars, labeled in Latin as 'Constellatio Pleiadum'.

Kepler’s Explanation of the Telescope: ”In order that the enormous possibilities harbored in the telescope could develop, it was necessary to clear up the theoretical laws by which it worked. And this achievement was reserved solely for Kepler. With the energy peculiar to him, inside of a few weeks, in the months of August and September of the same year, 1610, he composed a book tracing basically once and for all the laws governing the passage of light through lenses and systems of lenses. It is called ‘Dioptrice’, a word that Kepler himself coined and introduced into optics. […]”In problem 86 in which he shows ‘how with the help of two convex lenses visible objects can be made larger and distinct but inverted’ he develops the principle on which the astronomical telescope is based, the discovery of which is thus tied up with his name for all time. Further on follows the research into the double concave lens and the Galilean telescope in which a converging lens is used as objective and a diverging lens as eyepiece. By this suitable combination Kepler discovers the principle of today’s telescopic lens. Even this scanty account sows the epoch-making significance of the work. It is not an overstatement to call Kepler the father of modern optics because of it. (Max Caspar, “Kepler”, pp. 198-199) Kepler’s work is also the first to announce Galileo’s discovery that Venus has phases like the moon.

Wing G293; Cinti 155; Sotheran, I p. 75 (1476); cf. PMM 113 and Dibner, Heralds of Science, #7 (the 1610 edition)

Title page of 'Sidereus Nuncius' by Galileo Galilei, featuring Latin text about astronomical observations and discoveries, published in 1653.

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An illustration from an astronomical text showing celestial bodies in orbit, including the sun at the center and Venus and Earth depicted in various positions around it, highlighting different phases and alignments.

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