Newton’s own copy
Provenance: i) Without mark of ownership, from the library of Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who died intestate, whereupon his possessions were sold, including his books, which were purchased en bloc for £300 by; ii) John Huggins (1655–1745), warden of the Fleet Prison, as a gift for his son Charles Huggins, rector of Chinnor; iii) Dr James Musgrave (1705–1778), Huggins’s successor as rector of Chinnor, near Thame in Oxfordshire; removed to; iv) Barnsley Park, Gloucestershire, the home of his son, Sir James Musgrave, 8th Baronet of Hayton Castle (1752–1814), where the books were re-catalogued and some re-classified with Barnsley shelfmarks, remaining in the Musgrave family for generations, before a large portion was sold off in 1920; v) Whereabouts unknown, until its re- emergence in the stock of Chris Adam Smith, of Littlehampton, West Sussex, a dealer in modern first editions; sold by him c .2000 to; vi) David L. DiLaura, professor emeritus of civil and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, bibliographer of the history of optics.
17 NEWTON, Isaac. Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light. London: printed by W. Bowyer for W.
Innys, 1717 £375,000
[ 157279 ]
Octavo (196 × 122 mm). Contemporary dark blue morocco, spine elaborately tooled in gilt in compartments, second compartment for morocco label (now missing), boards panelled in gilt with foliate and floral tools, all within two-line border, marbled endpapers, gilt dentelles and edges. Housed in a custom black morocco-backed dark blue solander box by James Brockman. Title printed in double-rule border, woodcut head- and tailpieces, with 12 engraved folding plates. Armorial bookplate of Dr James Musgrave on front pastedown, pasted over bookplate of Rev. Charles Huggins, with Musgrave’s shelf mark E5–7 on front free endpaper verso; modern bookplate of David L. DiLaura partly covering Musgrave’s bookplate; see main note. Discreet restoration to binding by James Brockman: extremities and joints expertly consolidated and strengthened, endbands sewn identically to original, loose fragment of leather at head of spine neatly secured. Spine and tops of boards faded, gilt on spine somewhat dulled, joints cracked but cords holding very firm, a few surface scratches; leaf A2 in cancelled state, a little browned at edges where sometime loose, edges not gilded; contents generally crisp and clean. Still a very good copy. ¶ Babson 134; DiLaura, Bibliotheca Opticoria 269 (this copy); Gray 176; Harrison 1160; Printing and the Mind of Man 172 (first edition of 1704).
Isaac Newton’s own retained copy, bound in dark blue morocco, with the rare first state title page dated 1717, and the cancel leaf A2 (the first leaf of Advertisement I) inserted after binding, likely at Newton’s behest. In this copy, A2, the first leaf of the first preface or “Advertisement I”, is a cancel in order to correct a note about the source of part of the contents. Newton says that two sections of the book had been “put together out of scatter’d Papers”. In the uncancelled leaf, the text states that these two sections are “the Third Book, and the last Proposition of the Second Book”, which the cancel corrects to “the Third Book and the last Observation in the last part of the second Book”. The second edition in English is the first in octavo and the third overall, following the first edition of 1704 and the Latin translation of 1706. The entire edition comprised 750 copies, each using 24½ sheets of paper. The first issue is dated 1717 and includes William Bowyer’s name in the imprint; copies are recorded both with and without the cancel A2. The second issue has a cancel title dated 1718 and only the names of W. and J. Innys, Printers to the Royal Society, in the imprint and A2 set as the cancel.
The 1717 title page is much the rarer of the two: in ESTC the ratio is about 1:14. ESTC lists six copies of the 1717 issue, of which the only one in the UK is at Trinity College, Cambridge, acquired probably in the 19th century (see provenance). The others are at Case Western Reserve University, the University of Chicago, and the Huntington Library which has three copies, one of them annotated by Newton (bound in calf) which was advertised in Sotheran’s Bibliotheca Chemico-Mathematica II (1921), item 12539, and is now in the Babson collection (no. 133). In addition, other copies are at University College London, Yale Medical Library, and Cincinnati. Newton’s copies of his own books have rarely appeared on the market since the 1940s and are mostly accounted for in libraries. A presentation copy of the 1704 Opticks , given by Newton to Edmund Halley and bound in contemporary Cambridge panelled calf, sold in the Robert S. Pirie sales of 2015 for $1,330,000 (lot 918).
SIXTY FINE ITEMS
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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