[Bevis, John]

[Uranographia; or the Celestial Atlas, London, ca. 1750]



Oblong folio ( 14½ x 19 in.; 368 x 483 mm). 51  engraved celestial charts with the printed arms of the dedicatees (either a nobleman or academic institution), fine engraved frontispiece of Urania presenting the atlas to a royal patron (probably Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, d. 1751), the 1786 title-page (Atlas Celeste; or the Celestial Atlas) and index of charts loosely laid in; neat repair to platemark in upper right corner of plate 26, pl. 37–42 and 49–51 dampstained along inner margin, loose title-page and index soiled, with numerous neat repairs to tears, title-page remargined. Modern quarter calf over marbled boards.



Together with: John Bevis. Atlas Celeste. A Reproduction of the copy in the British Library together with a Reproduction of the Text in the Library of the American Philosophical Society. Alburgh, Archival Facsimiles Limited, 1987. Blue buckram, blue lettering label on upper cover. And with:  Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 125: no. 1 (February 1981). And with: The Map Collector, No. 39, (Summer 1987). The ensemble housed in an elaborate blue cloth folding case. 

Ashforth/Linda Hall Library, Out of This World 28; William B. Ashworth, Jr. "John Bevis and His Uranographia" (ca. 1750) in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 125: no. 1 (February 1981), pp. 52–73; John Booth, "The Star Atlas that never was," in The Map Collector, No. 39, (Summer 1987), pp. 22–24; Kevin J. Kilburn, Jay M. Pasachoff and Owen Gingerich, "The Forgotten Star Atlas: John Bevis's Uranographia Britannica," in the Journal of the History of Astronomy 34 (2003), pp. 125–144

A fine copy of John Bevis's rare "unpublished" star atlas. Outside of producing Uranographia Britannica, Bevis's main contributions to astronomy were the discovery of the Crab Nebula in 1731, which is depicted in this atlas for the first time in the plates for both Taurus and Orion. He is also responsible for the only known recorded observation of the occultation of one planet by another: Venus eclipsing Mercury on 28 May 1737.

Bevis worked upon his monumental atlas between 1747 and 1751. The plates closely mirror Bayer's Uranometria with two conspicuous differences: Bevis has included nearly twice as many stars and he not only delineates each principal constellation figure but includes the surrounding, generally partial figures as well. While Bevis followed Bayer, he also added fifteen constellations not recognized by Bayer, and these were largely patterned after Hevelius's Uranographia (1690). Bevis's Uranographia was also the last great atlas to depict stars with respect to their zodiacal positions, measured from the ecliptic plane (Kilburn, Pasachoff and Gingerich, p. 125).

An advertisement for the atlas (ca. 1748), now preserved at the Hunterian Library at the University of Glasgow, suggests that John Neale (named in the advertisement as the "undertaker" of the work) financed the work while Bevis was responsible for the scientific content. In 1750, Neale was declared bankrupt and the copperplates were sequestered by the London Courts of Chancery. While Bevis escaped the implications of the bankruptcy, his atlas was fated never to be published. However, Bevis did retain a number of pulls of the charts, which upon his death in 1771, were given to his executor, John Horsfall. At Horsfall's death in 1785, the catalogue for the sale of his estate listed six copies of the 51-chart set. Rare, there are now about 23 sets known to survive (Kilburn, Pasachoff and Gingerich, p. 139). Only seven copies have appeared at auction in the past thirty years.