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Tag Archives: French Revolution

Book of the Week — Clavis Historia Thuanae

07 Monday May 2018

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archivists, curia, Edict of Nantes, Edward Gibbon, England, French Enlightenment, French Revolution, Geneva, Germany, heresy, humanism, Index of Prohibited Books, Jac, Jacques Auguste de Thou, Jacques Dupuy, Keeper of the Royal Library, librarians, Parlement, philosophes, Portugal, Protestant, rare books, Roman Catholic, scholars, Spain, vellum, Voltaire, William Pitt

Clavis historiae thuanae: id est, nomenclature…
Jacques Dupuy (1591-1656)
Ratisponae: Sumtibus J. Z. Seidelii, 1696
Editio altera
D228 T552

Originally published in Geneva in 1634, this revised edition includes the word “Clavis” as the beginning of its title. The title translated into English reads: Nomenclature of Proper Names in the Historical Work of Jacques Auguste de Thou. Thou (1553-1617) was a historian whose fame and acclaim lasted well into the nineteenth century. His “History of His Own Time” (Historiarum sui temporis libri CXXXVIII) was added to the Index of Prohibited Books in 1609 for its humanist bent.

In spite of the ban and the humanism, his work received praise across the Roman Catholic/Protestant spectrum from Spain and Portugal to England and Germany. It was read by the curia it condemned and was a favorite of the Philosophes of the French Enlightenment. Voltaire referred to the “truthful eloquence” of Thou several times in his works. William Pitt quoted Thou, “the great historian of France,” in the early years of the French Revolution, and historian Edward Gibbon referred to Thou as the “authority of my masters.”

Thou was a leading member of Parlement. A Roman Catholic, he nonetheless counted many Protestants as his friends and helped negotiate the Edict of Nantes. He was appointed the Keeper of the Royal Library. His own library contained nearly 6,000 volumes, vast even by the standards of a private library-owning upper class. His “History” appeared in parts between 1604 and 1610. But the work was considered heresy in that it failed to condemn all Protestants outright. For this he fell from royal and papal favor.

The other indexer of Thou’s history was Jacques Dupuy, one of the many archivists and librarians who organized meetings of scholars at Thou’s home and, here, organized his book.

Rare Books copy bound in vellum, using loose leaves from another work. Pages are in double column format.

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Best Graduation Present Ever

04 Thursday May 2017

Posted by rarebooks in Donations

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Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, bookbinder, chemistry, College of Science Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, conservator, copper engravings, Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Science, Department of Chemistry, Dr. Henry S. White, Edinburgh, French Revolution, history, Journal of American Chemical Society, London, McKnight and Shell Professor of Chemical Engineering, MIT, Nancy Carlson Schrock, nanopores, nonobubbles, Rare Books Department, science, The University of Utah, University of Minnesota, University of Texas, William Creech


ElementsofChemistryTitle

“It is not the history of the science, or of the human mind, that we are to attempt in an elementary treatise. Our only aim should be ease and perspicuity, and with the utmost care to keep every thing out of view which may draw aside the attention of the student. It is a road which we should be continually rendering more smooth, and from which we must endeavour to remove every obstacle which can occasion delay.”
…
“Like three impressions of the same seal, the word ought to produce the idea, and the idea to be a picture of the fact. And, as ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows, that we cannot improve the language of any science, without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science, without improving the language or nomenclature which it belongs to.”

– Antoine Laurent Lavoisier from Elements of Chemistry

Elements of Chemistry in a New Systematic Order, Containing All the Modern…
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794)
Edinburgh: Printed for William Creech; and sold in London by G. G. & J. Robinson, and T. Kay, M, DCC, XCIX (1799)
Fourth edition
QD28 L42 1799

Gift of Dr. Henry S. White, Dean, College of Science Distinguished Professor of Chemistry.

When he received his Ph.D in chemistry from the University of Texas, Henry Sheldon White’s mother gave him a copy of the fourth edition of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry. The pages of this book were worn and brown with years of use, but it was intact, despite a deteriorated binding. Not a year later, while Dr. White held a postdoctoral appointment at MIT, he spent $105 to have the binding restored. The restoration was done by professional bookbinder and conservator Nancy Carlson Schrock.

The gift and its restoration were so important to Dr. White that he kept the book and the conservator’s invoice for the next thirty-four years. And then, he gave both to the Rare Books Department.

When Dr. White had occasion to hold our first edition of Lavoisier’s Traite, he fondly remembered the best graduation present ever. Dr. White remembered reading Lavoisier’s work like someone might remember holding the hand of one’s first love – a lasting impression, even as life moves on.

He remembered the detailed copper engraved illustrations at the back of the book, made by Lavoisier’s beloved wife, Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier. He lamented the loss of Lavoisier, who nearly survived, but did not, the French Revolution.

Henry White joined the faculty of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota, where he was the McKnight and Shell Professor of Chemical Engineering. In 1993, he moved to the Department of Chemistry at The University of Utah where he is a Distinguished Professor. Prof. White is the Dean of the College of Science at The University of Utah, and previously served as Chair of the Department of Chemistry (2007 – 2013).

Dr. White’s current research interests include high-field transport in nanometer-wide electrochemical cells, DNA structural analyses using protein ion channel recordings, the formation and stability of nanobubbles, and transport phenomena in nanopores.

All of which is and ever shall remain a mystery to me. But I do understand how the newly confirmed Dr. White must have felt when he held this book in his hands, a preserved package of ideas communicated by means of words, at the beginning of a new journey.

Congratulations to The University of Utah’s 2017 graduating class. May you render the road smooth with ease and perspicuity.

~ Luise Poulton, Managing Curator, Rare Books


The Air We Breathe — He named this substance “oxygen”

Traite elementaire de chimie presente dans un…
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794)
Paris: Cuchet, 1789
First edition, second issue
QD28 L4 1789 vols. 1 & 2

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier laid the foundation for modern chemistry by establishing the concept of elements as substances that cannot be further decomposed. He carried out the earliest biochemical experiments and through these explained many of the cyclical processes in animal and vegetable life. One of the most important consequences of Lavoisier’s work was the establishment of the concept of the conservation of matter.

Traite elementaire is presented in the form of a manual. Lavoisier offered a new theory of chemistry treated in a systematic approach unlike anything that had preceded it. He used accurate measurements for chemical research, such as the balance for weight distribution at every chemical change. He reformed chemical nomenclature, assigning every substance a name based upon the elements of which it was composed. He proved that the increase in the weight of metals was due to something taken from the air, and that this effect was constant in all such processes. He named this substance “oxygen.” He concluded that water was a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. He understood that respiration and combustion were similar processes, and, since oxygen was that part of the air that combined with metals in the process of combustion, he named the resulting substances oxides.

Compound bodies were found to present the combined weight of the simple bodies of which they are composed, while, when these simple bodies are withdrawn, they have the same weight as was put in them; i.e. matter remains constant throughout all chemical changes.

The book contains thirteen copperplate illustrations, drawn and engraved by Lavoisier’s wife, a skilled painter who had studied under the artist Louis David.

QD28-L4-1789-v.2-Planche1

QD28-L4-1789-v.2-Planche2

QD28-L4-1789-v.2-Planche11


QD28-L42-1796-title

Elements of Chemistry…Translated from the French by Robert Kerr…
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794)
Edinburgh: Printed for William Creech, 1796
QD28 L42 1796

This Kerr edition of Lavoisier’s work is important for its considerable additions and for an interesting postscript in which Kerr bitterly condemns the execution of Lavoisier. “The Philosophical World has now infinitely to deplore the tragical and untimely death of the great LAVOISIER…If the sanguinary tyranny of the monster Robespierre had committed only that outrage against eternal Justice, a succeeding age of the most perfect government would scarcely have sufficed, To France and to the world, to repair the prodigious injury that loss has produced to chemistry, and to all the sciences and economical arts with which is it connected.” Kerr also alludes in his prefatory remarks to the larger work that Lavoisier was going to write. “Had Lavoisier lived, as expressed in a letter received from him by the Translator, a short while before his massacre, it was his intention to have republished these Elements in an entirely new form, composing a Complete system of Philosophical Chemistry…”

With two folding tables and thirteen folding copper-plates engraved by Lizars after Mme. Lavoisier. Rare Books copy bound in contemporary tree calf, gilt ruled, red morocco label and gilt on spine.

QD28-L42-1796-foldout


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Book of the week – De rerum natura

04 Monday Jan 2016

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afterlife, Alexander Pope, biblical, blind-tooled, blindstamped, body, British, Cambridge, Church of England, classics, Constance, De rerum natura, decoration, engraved, Epicurus, fire, folio, French Revolution, frontispiece, Fulda, Germany, Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, Gilbert Wakefield, gilt, gods, government, Greek, Hamilton, Homer, Horace, Jesus College, Londini, Lucretius, mathematics, ministry, morocco, mortal, nature, New Testament, pamphlets, poem, poet, portrait, punishment, rules, scholar, soul, Titus Lucretius Carus, tragedies, Tuscan, Unitarian, vicar, Virgil, Wa, Wakefield, world

PA6482-A2-1796-v.1-portraitPA6482-A2-1796-v.1-titlePA6482-A2-1796-v.1-pg1

DE RERUM NATURA LIBROS SEX, AD EXEMPLARIUM…
Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99 BCE – ca. 55 BCE)
Londini: Impensis editoris, typis A. Hamilton, 1796-7
PA6482 A2 1796 oversize

De Rerum Natura is the only surviving work of Lucretius. Only one manuscript copy of it is known to exist. This manuscript was found in 1417 in a monastery at Fulda in Germany by Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, a Tuscan secretary to a church general council at Constance.

It is a didactic poem of 7,400 lines in six books, in which the poet expounds on the world view of the ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus. The object was to abolish belief that the gods intervened in the world and that the soul could experience punishment in an afterlife. Lucretius demonstrated that the world is, instead, governed by mechanical laws of nature. He described the soul as mortal and posited that it perishes with the body.

This is the first edition of the “Wakefield” edition, the edition by Gilbert Wakefield (1756-1801). Wakefield was a biblical scholar. The son of a vicar, he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, through a scholarship. He studied mathematics and the classics. Although he took orders, he left the ministry and the Church of England and became a Unitarian. He earned his living as a tutor while writing controversial pamphlets attacking the government. He was imprisoned for two years for the publication of a pamphlet titled, “A Reply to some Parts of the Bishop of Landoff’s Address,” in which he defended the French Revolution. To support himself, he published a translation of the New Testament (1792), companion editions to Horace (1794) and Virgil (1796), an edition with commentary of Greek tragedies (1794), an annotated edition of Alexander Pope’s Homer (1796), and this, his Lucretius. He published his De Rerum Natura at his own expense.

The book established Wakefield as a leading British scholar. The large paper, folio edition was mostly destroyed by a fire in the printing-office in which they were stored.

Engraved portrait of Gilbert Wakefield on frontispiece. Bound in contemporary straight-grained black morocco, panelled covers with broad blind-tooled borders and gilt edges, spine with broad gilt rules and blindstamped decoration. Edition of fifty copies.

 

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Book of the Week – Rights of Man

19 Monday Jan 2015

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Edmund Burke, French Revolution, John Quincy Adams, London, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, United States


Rights of Man
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
London: printed for H.D. Symonds, 1792

In Rights of Man, Thomas Paine defended the French Revolution against attacks made by Edmund Burke. Thomas Jefferson championed Rights of Man. Paine was made a French citizen by the assembly in 1792 and was elected to the convention where he allied himself with the moderate republicans who lost power during the terror. Paine returned to the United States in 1802.

 

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