[Rarebooks] fa: 1692 Athenian Mercury - MATHEMATICS/GEOMETRY: Spheroids, Ozanam, William Leybourn &c.

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other science and mathematics titles, auctions ending Sunday, October 6. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/o8jk43a

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.



The Athenian Mercury. Vol. 6, Numb. 16. [AND] Vol. 7, Numb. 8. [AND] Vol. 9, Numb. 26. [AND] Vol. 10, Numb. 20. London: Printed for John Dunton at the Raven in the Poultrey, 1692-93. Five sheets, folio (32.5 x 19.5 cm.; 12 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.), printed on both sides. Modest wear to the edges and small pinholes to the left  margins; one sheet browned with worming to the bottom margin, some lighter tanning and stains to the others; two sheets with unobtrusive archival paper repairs.
Four separate mathematics-related issues (three of them illustrated with woodcuts) of this popular late seventeenth-century English periodical, the first newspaper to use the question-and-answer format.

In the first issue, a reader asks a question about "the Mensuration [measuring] of Spheroids." The editors' reply begins, "the Learned Mathematicians of this Town are not ignorant how long the Attempts of answering this and such like Questions have been fruitless... but now they are grown so common, that whoever pretends to solve 'em gets as much Credit by it as if he shou'd boast of discovering the Rule of Three..." They then demonstrate the solution to the problem as formulated by "the Ingenious Mr. Ozanam [Jacques Ozanam]." In the second issue, the editors provide a solution to another reader's problem: "The 4 sides and Area of a Trapezium being given, a Theorem is required to find the Diagonal…" The fourth issue, as the introductory paragraph announces, is largely devoted to geometry: "We shall here, according to our Promise some time since, endeavour the Resolutions of the best of those Mathematical Theorems and Problems which have been sent into us..." Meanwhile, the third issue, while addressing no specific mathematical problems, includes a full-page prospectus (printed on both sides): "Proposals for the Printing of a Book of William Leybourn's, Author of the late Cursus Mathematicus, and of divers other Mathematical Tractates, who hath now by him a Miscellaneous Manuscript ready for the Press, which he intends to Entitle Pleasure with Profit..." William Leybourn (1626-1716) was a pioneering English mathematician and land surveyor, as well as being co-author of the first book on astronomy written in English (Urania Practica, 1648). His major works include The Compleat Surveyor (1653), Arithmetick, Vulgar, Decimal, and Instrumental (1657), and Cursus Mathematicus: Mathematical Sciences in Nine Books (1690).

As an added bonus, this same issue is largely devoted to questions of Love, Lust & Courtship, including several from a female reader (e.g. "After what manner a young Lady may receive the Addresses of her Pretended Lover?" [and] "Whether the admittance of his frequent Embraces may not render him Proud and her Cheap?") and one from a reader who clearly disapproves of women using makeup: "Whether the Devil has not baits enough to allure people to Lust and Vanity, without calling in the Aids of Patches and Paint?" Additionally, the fourth issue contains a large-print advertisement for "Mr. Increase and Mr. Cotton Mather's New Discourse concerning the New-England WITCHES and WITCHCRAFT… to which will be added the Observations of a Person who was upon the place 6 or 7 days, when the suspected WITCHES were first taken into Examination…"