[Ressig, Kornelius]

[Sozvezdiya, predstavlennye na XXX tablitsakh .... St. Petersburg, 1829]



Oblong folio (12½  x 16½  in.; 318 x 419 mm).  3 sectional titles printed in gold, 30 engraved plates, 29 of them printed in gold on a dark blue background, holes punched out for the stars of the first four magnitudes, the plates mounted on white paper with india paper pasted onto the verso covering the punched holes, the final plate printed in gold on white paper, plates mounted on guards; minimal wear and spotting to margins of plates, lacks general title-page and 40-page letterpress text.  Modern quarter calf, marbled boards, original plain wrappers bound in; minimal wear.

Lavrov, Bibliografiya Russkoi astronomicheskoi literatur (Moscow, 1968), pp. 42–43.  Not in NUC

The plates from Reissig's spectacularly beautiful celestial atlas, the first Russian celestial atlas. Rare.

Kornelius Reissig was director of the military academy of St. Petersburg, and the author of mor than a dozen works on statics, barometrics, and related subjects.  His celestial atlas is based on Bode (see lot 9).  The use of a dark background in celestial stlases was not an innovation.  Reissig's immediate precursor was Goldbach, who taught in Moscow and who used the technique in his atlas of 1799.  The sumptuous printing of Reissig's atlas is, however, of a different order.