DECKER, TWEEDE DEEL VAN DE NIEVWE TEL-KONST, 1627; LA SCIENCE DES CHINOIS, OTHERS, MACCLESFIELD COPY

Briggs, Henry (1561-1630). Logarithmicall arithmetike. Or tables of logarithmes for absolute numbers... These numbers were first invented by the most excellent Iohn Neper Baron of Marchiston, and the same were transformed, and the foundation and use of them illustrated with his approbation by Henry Briggs Sir Henry Savile Professor of Geometrie in the Universitie of Oxford. The uses whereof were written in Latin by the author himselfe, and since his death published in English by diverse of his friends according to his mind, for the benefit of such as understand not the Latin tongue. London: George Miller, 1631, [ESTC S107123; STC 3740], lacking the Tables (which were the sheets printed in Gouda in 1628 by Rammezeyn) Grüneberg, Christian (d.1700). Sphinx Arithmetica, Sesquicentum εσφιγμενων, Vulgarem Logisticam Decimalem, Logisticam Sexagenariam, Logarithmicam Nepperianam Algebraicam Numerosam Arithmeticam Complexorum. Frankfurt an der Oder: Johann Coepsel, [c.1690], [VD17 12:196755Y (recording only Bayerische Staatsbibliothek copy)], first two leaves browned and scorched at corner [Confucius] La Science des Chinois traduite mot pour mot de la langue chinoise par le R. Père Intorcetta Iesuite. Paris: Gervais Clousier & André Cramoisy, 1672, 24pp., [Cordier, Bibl. Sinica 1389-1392] 4 works in one volume, folio (300 x 185mm.), eighteenth-century English half calf, spine gilt with red morocco label ("Arithmetic"), modern fitted cloth folding box Decker, Ezechiel de. Tweede deel vande niewe tel-konst. Facsimile of the only copy extant. Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1964, 4to, cream cloth gilt, glassine jacket, [T&W D24bis] together 2 volumes

Earls of Macclesfield, bookplate, sale in these rooms, 10 June 2004, lot 556, £26,000, Erwin Tomash

Tomash & Williams D24, B253, G93, I22; Henderson pp.52-54 no. 22.1; Hoock & Jeannin II/D12.2; Hoogendoorn p.273 Deck03; Otto E. van Poelje, “Adriaen Vlacq and Ezechiel de Decker: Dutch Contributors to the Early Tables of Briggsian Logarithms” in Journal of the Oughtred Society 14 (2005), pp.30-40

the condition of this lot is as described in the catalogue description
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De Decker’s extremely rare work is a practical guide to the use of logarithmic tables for commercial purposes, such as compound interest calculations. The author was a teacher of geometry and arithmetic in Gouda, where in 1626 he had published Eerste deel van de Nieuwe Telkonst, an introduction to commercial arithmetic, accompanied by Napier’s texts on the construction of logarithms (as translated by his collaborator, Adriaan Vlacq, into Dutch), and Simon Stevin’s work (1585) on decimal numbers. In a separate book, Nieuwe Telkonst, inhoudende de logarithmi, logarithmic tables copied from Gunter’s Canon Triangulorum (1620) and Briggs’s Arithmetica Logarithmica (1624) were supplied. In both these volumes, the future publication by Vlacq of a “Great Table” giving the logarithms of all numbers from 1 to 100,000 to ten decimal places is promised. The following year, de Decker published the Tweede deel van de Nieuwe Telkonst, announcing in a “Preface to the Art-loving Reader” the imminent publication of Vlacq’s “Great Table”, in Latin, French, and Dutch: “Enjoy meanwhile this book, until the other will leave the printing press”. It appears, however, that de Decker had discovered a shortcut to calculating the missing logarithms, and that he proceeded without Vlacq, sending his own “Great Table” to the printer Rammazeyn. Perhaps because de Decker had broken his contract with Vlacq, or “because Vlacq must have shown that an ‘academic’ version in the style of Briggs’ Arithmetica Logarithmica would sell better than de Decker’s competing ‘merchant-oriented’ version,” the publication was quickly suppressed (Van Poelje). The sheets of de Decker’s extensive introduction were destroyed; his tables were bound into Vlacq’s Arithmetica Logarithmica of 1628 (see lot 679).

The early historians and bibliographers - Cantor, Cajori, De Morgan, Glaisher, Bierens de Haan - all doubted that copies of the Tweede deel had survived. In 1920, a volume containing both de Decker’s text and his “Great Tables” was acquired by the Life Assurance Society "Utrecht" (now Utrecht, AMEV, A-II 23; facsimile edition of the text and a few leaves of the tables, Nieuwkoop, 1964; a copy is included in this lot). Until the appearance of the present volume, which contains de Decker’s text, but not his tables, that copy was considered a unicum.

Briggs: An introduction to the use of logarithms, not in fact a translation of Briggs’ Arithmetica logarithmica (London 1624) - as suggested by the title-page - but a version of Vlacq’s Arithmetica logarithmica (Gouda 1628). The introduction is usually accompanied by a large set of tables (764pp.), being the actual sheets of De Decker’s “Great Tables”, printed in Gouda in 1628, with a divisional title in Dutch (Tafel der Logarithmi…). These tables have not been bound in the present volume (cf. Henderson pp.58-59 26.0).

Grüneberg: An introduction to mathematics cast in the form of a dialogue between Oedipus and the Sphinx; the riddles 529-533 are concerned with Naperian logarithms. Although the author, professor of mathematics in Frankfurt an der Oder, operated a private press, this book is a product of the university press (Josef Benzing & Christoph Reske, Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet, Wiesbaden 2015, pp.275, 420).

Confucius: The Jesuit Prospero Intorcetta (1625-1696) had accompanied Martino Martini to China in 1657 and apart from a brief spell back in Rome (1669-1676), lived in China for the remainder of his life. He made this Latin translation of the Chung Yung, or Doctrine of the Mean, one of the four books which constituted the core of Chinese education, before his return trip to Europe, and it was first published in a parallel Chinese-Latin edition in Guangzhou and Goa, in 1667-1669. A copy of that book came into the hands of the French scholar, Melchisédech Thévenot, who reprinted the Latin texts in his Relations de divers voyages curieux (Paris: Cramoisy, 1672), volume 4 (subtitled Sinarum Scientia politico-moralis), adding French translations. The publisher Cramoisy simultaneously issued those sheets as an independent work, printing the new title-page La Science des Chinois traduite which is found here. “Leaving aside the few lines of the Daxue translated by [Michele] Ruggieri and published in 1593, the publication by Thévenot in 1672 can be considered the first translation of a Confucian classic to be published in Europe” (Thierry Meynard, The Jesuit Reading of Confucius, Leiden 2015, pp.13-14).