Robert Hooke. Micrographia

The first edition of Micrographia by Robert Hooke published by the Royal Society in 1665. I'd like to show it to you. I'm Adam Douglas with Peter Harrington and we can see here the book was published by the Royal Society and the first edition is dated there on the title page 1665 and opposite it is the license leaf, sometimes called the imprimatur, which is the permission to print it on behalf of the Royal Society. The Royal Society had only recently been founded and this is one of the first books published by the Royal Society. It's titled Micrographia or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses. What happened in the beginning of the 17th century, you had Galileo famously got his telescope and looked up at the moons of Jupiter and made great discoveries. Robert Hooke, who was a leading member of the Royal Society, in effect turned the telescope the other way and he was using a microscope for the first time to look down into some of the hidden details of life. His microscope is illustrated here in the book in one of the folding plates for which the book is famous. Fold out like this and there's his microscope. Basically Robert Hooke was like a kid with a new toy. He'd got his new microscope and he pointed it at just about anything that he could see and all the world around him, which he'd previously seen through his ordinary eyes, was revealed in all its glory. The most famous plate is this one here, this folding plate, which gradually reveals itself and that is the flea. There's an irony of course that at the same time he was looking at the flea, the flea was busy spreading the bubonic plague around London. So there's a historical irony there. But you can see the intense detail in these plates and remember that nobody had seen them before. Samuel Peet talks in his diary about buying this book, taking it home and spending all night staring at the detail, things he'd never seen before. Some of the plates are even bigger than that. The next one is a particularly lovely one of a louse. Great big folding plate there with all the detail for us to see for the first time. So it really was a new world that he was exploring. Christopher Wren was involved with the Royal Society as well and he is believed to have had a hand in preparing these plates for the press. There we see an ant and although people must have had some idea of what an ant looked like, to see the detail for the first time, those little hairs on the ant and the way its feet work, the proboscis, the jaws, quite extraordinary to see all this for the first time. And it really had, there are very few books that have that effect, that really they enable you to see the world afresh for the first time. There's a little feather there showing the way feathers are arranged. And also he actually includes in the book even some, this is the microcosm as it were, he also includes a little bit of the macrocosm. Here he is discussing the craters of the moon, again with the same attention to detail and the same scientific rigour. So it really is one of the most exciting books in science. It's a large folio. This copy is in very good condition. You can imagine the way the plates are put together, they're almost randomly inserted in the book. There are different sizes, different folds and quite often the famous plates like the Laos will be badly torn and repaired. Now this one here has a little tear at the weakest point of the plate but it's not, it's otherwise clean and it's really for this book a really very good copy indeed. The book is from the library of the Society of Writers to the Signet in Edinburgh, which is the legal society in Edinburgh, and it has its gilt supra on the covers there. The copy we have is actually being re-backed. The spine has been replaced. There's no way around it with a book like this from this date, a 17th century book, that's been read over and over again. It's the kind of book you want to open and pour over. Eventually the leather on the joints gives way and so it's been replaced but it's been done handsomely into style and it's an extremely nice copy of one of the most famous books in the history of science. There are details about it on our website, Peter Harrington, and contact details if you'd like to discuss it with us.