Carlotta Maury was one of the earliest women to be employed as a professional scientist by an oil company, when she joined Royal Dutch Shell. Together 5 items: 3 offprints bound in 2 volumes, quarto (296 × 240 mm). Finely bound by The Atelier Bindery for Charles Scribner’s in 1933 in half blue morocco, blue cloth sides, front boards lettered in gilt, double gilt fillet panels to the compartments, single fillets at the spine and corner edges. Together with 3 glass-plate photographs c .1889 (385 × 301 mm), mounted and framed in contemporary oak, each image plate housed between a sheet of clear and a sheet of milk glass: “22: Spectrum of B[eta] Aurigae”; “23: Peculiar Spectra”; “41: untitled”. Some expert furbishment to bindings (joints repaired, corners and edges consolidated, colour and gilt retouched), faint marks to covers, lower right corner of contents faintly damp stained in “The Spectral Changes of Beta Lyrae”; still an attractive set. Daniel R. Altschuler & Fernando J. Ballesteros, The Women of the Moon , 2019; Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars, 2017. £7,500 [146401] 109 MORRIS, Jan. South African Winter. London: Faber and Faber, 1958 First edition, first impression, signed by the author on the title page. This copy has the ownership inscription and bookplate of George Lowe, Morris’s friend and fellow team member in the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition; Morris (1926–2020) was the only journalist to accompany the expedition. After chronicling the historic ascent of Mount Everest, Morris found global fame first as a journalist, and later as a celebrated essayist and one of the most famous transgender women in the world. In Coronation Everest (1958), Morris recalled: “I caught sight of George Lowe, leading the party down the hill. He was raising his arm and waving as he walked! It was thumbs up! Everest was climbed!” (p. 155). Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With supplied dust jacket. Lean to spine, a little fading to cloth, rubbing to lower board edges, edges foxed, contents clean. A very good, fresh copy in like dust jacket, a little rubbed, spine panel partially faded, small chips to spine ends and corners, couple of nicks, trivial marks to rear panel, front panel bright. ¶ We use the pronouns she/her for Morris, in reference to her chosen name. £1,500 [162096]
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classification and analyzed 681 bright northern stars in detail, and contains her catalogue of spectra, in which she described her groundbreaking classification system of the “c-characteristic” (identifying very narrow lines in the spectrum). Though at the time this appeared to be a niche observation, in 1905 the Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung found that stars which Maury had tagged with this characteristic coincided with those he had identified as giant stars, meaning that Maury had in fact found a way to measure the size of stars. Hertzsprung hailed her discovery “the most important advancement in stellar classification since the trials by Vogel and Secchi” (Altschuler & Ballesteros, p. 154). He noted that, “to neglect the c-properties of classifying stellar spectra . . . is nearly the same thing as if a zoologist, who has detected the deciding differences between a whale and a fish, would continue classifying them together” (ibid.). Despite this, Pickering declined to include the classification in Draper’s official catalogue. Maury’s contribution was not fully recognized until 1922 when the International Astronomical Union modified its classification scheme, adding the prefix “c” for stars that had narrow lines in their spectra. The noted astronomer William Wilson Morgan dedicated the Revised MK Spectral Atlas for Stars Earlier Than the Sun to “Antonia C. Maury . . . Master Morphologist of Stellar Spectra” whom he acclaimed as “the single greatest mind that has ever engaged itself in the field of the morphology of stellar spectra”. ii) “The Orbit of the Spectroscopic Binary ζ Centauri”: contains Maury’s determination of the orbit of spectroscopic binary Zeta Centauri , a star system in the southern constellation of Centaurus. iii) “The Spectral Changes of Beta Lyrae”: published in 1933, two years before her retirement, this treatise comprise Maury’s other major contribution to her field, and contains her analysis and interpretation of the complex changes in the spectrograms of Beta Lyrae, a binary in the star system in the Lyra constellation. She had studied it for many years, examining nearly 300 spectra of the star. In a typed letter signed accompanying the volumes and dated November 1933, Carlotta Maury suggests to Antonia that as a Christmas present “it seems as if money to have your new memoir in the Annals of the Observatory handsomely bound would be nice. I thought of having it done by Scribner’s in blue levant with gold trim and lettering, like mine in red levant”. In 1910
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108 MAURY, Antonia C. Offprints from The Annals of Harvard College Observatory and The Harvard College Observatory Circular ; together with three glass plate astronomical photographs. Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, University Press, 1897 & 1933 one of the most important contributions to stellar classification Antonia Maury’s own copies of her key contributions to the field of stellar classification, and the first Harvard Observatory publication to have a woman’s name in the title. The two volumes were presented by her sister, the distinguished palaeontologist Dr Carlotta Maury, and are accompanied by three glass plate astronomical photographs from the period in which Maury worked at Harvard, one of which depicts Maury’s discovery of the binary star Beta Aurigae, only the second such star to be identified at the time. Antonia Maury (1866–1952) entered Vassar College in 1883 (sister college to Yale, which was then only open to male students) and graduated in 1887 with honours in physics, astronomy, and philosophy. In 1889 she joined Edward Charles Pickering’s group of astronomers as a Harvard computer,
analysing and classifying spectra for the Henry Draper Catalogue . Draper, Maury’s uncle, was a pioneering astronomical photographer, and the catalogue project was established after his death to continue his work in the spectral analysis of stars from photographs taken through telescopes. There, Maury was the first astronomer to detect and calculate the orbit of a spectroscopic binary – a pair of stars so close together that they appear as a single star in the night sky from Earth. Pickering discovered the first such star in 1887; Maury discovered the second, Beta Aurigae, in 1889. Binaries were to remain a subject of continuing interest for the rest of her life. Maury left the observatory in 1891 to take up a teaching position in Cambridge, Massachusetts, returning to work occasionally on the project, before rejoining in 1918 as an adjunct professor. In 1943 Maury was awarded the Annie J. Cannon Prize for her stellar classification system – an award that her former colleague had instituted in 1933 for women in America who had made an important contribution to the field of astronomy. The Maury crater on the Moon is named in her honour. The offprints included comprise: i) “Spectra of Bright Stars”: the first observatory publication to have a woman’s name in the title. It covers her examination of 4,800 stellar photographs, in which she used her own system of
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All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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