Serendipitous

I went to the Special Collections office today to scan copies of this beautiful work of reproduced 18th-century English publishing:



"Lexicon Technicum. Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts
and Sciences." By John Harris. Volume 2 (London 1710).
Article: "Curves, by Sir Isaac Newton."

as printed in

The Mathematical Works of Isaac Newton,
Volume 2
Assembled with an Introduction by
Dr. Derek T. Whiteside,
Research Assistant,
Whipple Science Museum,
Cambridge, England

The Sources of Science
1967
Johnson Reprint Corporation
New York and London


This book isn't kept in the Special Collections. I just wanted to use their scanner.
While we were waiting for files to download though, I was talking with the Special Collections Manager about my thesis and he mentioned that, on an unrelated topic, there happened to be an original copy of Newton's Opticks in the Rare Book Collection.

Holy Cow.

It was a much more related topic than he expected. I happened to know that the article I'd just been scanning was an Appendix to Newton's publication of Opticks


Old Books are so beautiful,
perhaps because publishing was a much greater feat.

...Though it was typeset,
I think I found on the titles for pages of figures the horizontal pencil lines I'd expect to see under handwritten calligraphy...

One of the figures pages from an original, First-Edition printing of
Enumeratio linearum tertii ordinis,
the first Appendix to
Opticks