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Library
Services in UCL has many fine book collections, of which
the most outstanding are the Graves (bequeathed 1870),
the Rotton (bequeathed 1926) and the Ogden (acquired
1953) libraries. The most important and valuable of
these is the Graves collection.
John
Thomas Graves was born in 1806
to a wealthy
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Protestant family. He was Professor of |
Illustration
of people using cannon in geometry taken from A geometrical
practical treatize named Pantometria by Leonard Digges
the Elder, published in 1591. Held in the collection.
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Jurisprudence at University College London from 1838 to 1843.
On his retirement from the College Graves became a Poor Law
Inspector, but spent most of his time amassing a wonderful library
of early scientific works. On his death in 1870 the bulk of
this library was bequeathed to University College London. The
library acquired contains over 10,000 books, 4,600 pamphlets,
51 manuscripts and numerous periodicals, covering mainly mathematics
and astronomy. Described as probably the most important private
mathematical collection ever made, it contains many rare and
possibly unique items.
Probably
the most important single collection within the Graves material
is the Euclid collection, which contains eighty-three of the
editions of Euclid's works printed before 1640. The collection
includes the editio princeps published by Erhard Ratdolt
at Venice in 1482, and amongst the translations are the first
into any modern language, the Italian of 1543, the first German
translation (1562), the first French (1564), John Day's edition
of the first English translation with John Dee's preface of
1570, the first edition in Arabic (1594) and later translations
into Turkish, Chinese, Persian, Hebrew, Finnish and many other
languages.
The
Graves collection includes seventy-five of the Library's incunabula
and many famous books such as first editions of Copernicus's
De revolutionibus of 1543, Newton's Principia and
Opticks, and Thomas Salusbury's Mathematical Collections
of 1661-65. There are first editions of fascinating "association
copies" of the the works of Priestley, Boyle, Keppler,
Galileo, and Napier and important runs of early scientific
periodicals. There are also many treasures such as Henry Cavendish's
copy of Pascal's Traité de l'équilibre des
liqueurs of 1663 and, of special note, a copy of Galileo's
Il Saggiatore, published in Rome in 1623 and inscribed
to Galileo's friend Morandi.
Further
information from s.stead@ucl.ac.uk
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