Forum Auctions
Lot 179
Mathematics & Navigation.- Gunter (Edmund) The description and vse of the sector, crosse-staffe, and other instruments:...and the vse thereof in astronomie, navigation, dialling, and fortification, &c., 4 parts in 1 vol., second edition, engraved additional pictorial title and frontispiece, woodcut diagram to printed title, 2 woodcut plates, 2 printed slips ('The Scale of Chords and Rumba' and 'A Table for the use of the Chaine'), numerous woodcut diagrams and illustrations in text, without blank 2L2, the odd instance of later pencil marginalia, additional title with small ink stain and crease, occasional spotting or light staining, lightly browned, contemporary blind-ruled calf, sympathetically rebacked, spine in compartments and with red morocco label, rubbed, [Tomash & Williams G102; STC 12523], small 4to, Printed by William Iones, for Iames Bowler, and are to be sold at the Marigold in Pauls Church-yard, 1636.⁂ A solid copy of this considerably expanded second edition, which is rarely found complete (our copy lacking only a blank). Includes a chapter on the mathematics of fortification not published before. It 'must rank with Eden's translation of Cortes's Arte de Navegar and Wright's Certaine Errors as one of the three most important English books ever published for the improvement of navigation... [Gunter] opened up... an entirely new field, that of arithmetical navigation' (Waters, Art of Navigation, p. 359).
