Details
GALILEI, GALILEO. Dialogo... sopre i due massimi sistemi del mondo Tolemaico, e Copernicano. Florence: Giovanni Batista Landini 1632. 4to, 233 x 169 mm. (9 3/16 x 6 5/8 in.), AN ENTIRELY UNTRIMMED COPY, early limp paper boards (280 x 180 mm.), ink lettering "Galileo...Opere T.IV. Dialogo" on backstrip, sewn on three cords, new sewing, endpapers renewed, Hh1-2 unopened, repaired tears to fols. B4, B5 and C1, 3 leaves with very minor marginal tears, Q1 with 3 small holes due to paper imperfections, a few leaves very slightly foxed or darkened.
FIRST EDITION, additional engraved frontispiece-title by Stefano della Bella, woodcut printer's device on title-page, numerous woodcut diagrams in text, typographical ornaments, with the pasted cancel slip to sidenote on F6v as usual, errata leaf Ff6 without cancel slip, with final blank Kk4. Cinti 89; Dibner Heralds of Science 8; Grolier/Horblit 18c; PMM 128.
A FINE COPY, in unusually fresh condition, of Galileo's validation of the Copernican view of the solar system and challenge to Aristotelian orthodoxy. Presented with seeming objectivity as a dialogue between a supporter of Copernicus, a follower of Ptolemy, and an educated layman whom the other two attempt to convince, "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 defended 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" (Printing and the Mind of Man). Publication of the Dialogo led to Galileo's arrest and trial by the Inquisition; he was forced to abjure his arguments for Copernicus and was sentenced to permanent house arrest. The book remained on the Index librorum prohibitorum until 1823.
Provenance: Early manuscript correction (supplying the missing letter "H") to diagram on M8v -- Unidentified nineteenth-century shelfmark label ("7") at foot of spine.
FIRST EDITION, additional engraved frontispiece-title by Stefano della Bella, woodcut printer's device on title-page, numerous woodcut diagrams in text, typographical ornaments, with the pasted cancel slip to sidenote on F6v as usual, errata leaf Ff6 without cancel slip, with final blank Kk4. Cinti 89; Dibner Heralds of Science 8; Grolier/Horblit 18c; PMM 128.
A FINE COPY, in unusually fresh condition, of Galileo's validation of the Copernican view of the solar system and challenge to Aristotelian orthodoxy. Presented with seeming objectivity as a dialogue between a supporter of Copernicus, a follower of Ptolemy, and an educated layman whom the other two attempt to convince, "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 defended 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" (Printing and the Mind of Man). Publication of the Dialogo led to Galileo's arrest and trial by the Inquisition; he was forced to abjure his arguments for Copernicus and was sentenced to permanent house arrest. The book remained on the Index librorum prohibitorum until 1823.
Provenance: Early manuscript correction (supplying the missing letter "H") to diagram on M8v -- Unidentified nineteenth-century shelfmark label ("7") at foot of spine.