Galilei, Galileo

Sidereus nuncius magna, longeque admirabilia spectacula pandens. Frankfurt-am-Main: [Zacharias] Palthenius, 1610



8vo (7 x 4 in.; 178 x 102 mm). Woodcut printer's device on title, 2 woodcut folding plates, 7 woodcut text illustrations, woodcut headpieces and decorative initials; browned as usual for German publications of this period, small dampstain in upper and lower margin of first quire, a few rust spots one affecting a letter on page 23. Contemporary limp vellum; a few stains and faded manuscript inscription on lower cover. Cloth folding case.

Carli & Favaro 31; Cinti 28; Dibner, Heralds of Science 7n; Zinner 4271

Second edition, published a few months after the first, and the first publication of any of Galileo's works outside of Italy.

This work contains the first account of astronomical discoveries made with the telescope: the Milky Way and nebulae composed of stars, the moons of Jupiter, and the irregular surface of the Moon. First published at Venice, on 12 March 1610, it sold out the first week. The pamphlet quickly reached Germany, where it was reissued in the present pirated edition in Frankfurt.

In the haste of this enterprise, little time or expense was devoted to copying Galileo's careful lunar engravings. Consequently, the Frankfurt edition contains woodcuts, not engravings, less accurately presented than the original illustrations (for example, the views of the lunar surface are out of order and printed upside down).

The Frankfurt edition inaugurates the tradition of white-on-black woodcut illustration which makes such an effective medium for the depiction of stars as points of light on a black sky. The stars in the first edition were depicted as black against a blank page. The Frankfurt woodcuts were the source for the illustrations in most of the later editions of the Sidereus nuncius, and in many moon handbooks right up to the present day.

This edition is extremely rare with the folding woodcut plates which show the Pleiades, Orion's belt, and two nebulae; no copy has appeared at auction with them since the sale of the Signet Library (11 April 1960, lot 1180), and they are often lacking in library copies.