Details
GALILEI, GALILEO. Dialogo... sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo Tolemaico, e Copernicano. Florence: Giovanni Batista Landini, 1632. Woodcut printer's device on title-page and numerous woodcut diagrams in text. Small 4to, 216 x 140 mm. (8½ x 5 5/8 in.), eighteenth-century English red morocco, cover with triple gilt fillet border, spine gilt, board edges gilt, upper joint cracked, a few chips at spine ends; lacking engraved frontispiece by Stefano della Bella (photographic reproduction mounted on preliminary leaf), title reinforced along gutter margin, first quire apparently supplied from another copy, leaves S1 and S8 a little short, Bb4 (mis-signed Bb3) and Bb6 misbound (pp. 391/392 and 395/396, respectively), lacks final blank (Kk4), title and a few leaves with pale marginal foxing or soiling, otherwise a clean copy. FIRST EDITION, without the pasted cancel slip to sidenote on F6v, errata leaf Ff6 without cancel slip. Cinti 89; Dibner Heralds of Science 8; Grolier/Horblit 18c; PMM 128.
Galileo's validation of the Copernican view of the solar system and challenge to Aristotelian orthodoxy. "In the form of an open discussion between three friends - intellectually speaking, a radical, a conservative, and an agnostic - it is a masterly polemic for the new science. It displays all the great discoveries in the heavens which the ancients had ignored; it inveighs against the sterility, wilfulness, and ignorance of those who defend their systems; it revels in the simplicity of Copernican thought and, above all, it teaches that the movement of the earth makes sense in philosophy, that is, in physics"--PMM.
Galileo's validation of the Copernican view of the solar system and challenge to Aristotelian orthodoxy. "In the form of an open discussion between three friends - intellectually speaking, a radical, a conservative, and an agnostic - it is a masterly polemic for the new science. It displays all the great discoveries in the heavens which the ancients had ignored; it inveighs against the sterility, wilfulness, and ignorance of those who defend their systems; it revels in the simplicity of Copernican thought and, above all, it teaches that the movement of the earth makes sense in philosophy, that is, in physics"--PMM.
Provenance
William Charles De Meuron, Earl Fitzwilliam, bookplate.