To read Shakespeare’s sonnets as originally published in 1609 is to come to terms with a rather different text than that found in the collected works. Here they stand alone as the verse of an Elizabethan poet, as a fresh and consistent body of writing. Although the book has been studied for centuries, its contents are still wrapped in mystery. The precise circumstances of publication may never be known: it remains uncertain when the poems were written and to whom, whether the text was revised for publication or even authorized, and whether its appearance was designed to tantalize a knowing coterie or delight the wider world with (as Keats wrote) "fine things said unintentionally." This Octavo Edition features beautiful images of the entire book, searchable live text, and bibliographical information. Commentary by Arthur Freeman.

Sonnets

Literature & Fiction

Shakespeare., William

History & Criticism

Octavo

Digital Edition of original published in London, 1755. Includes searchable live text, commentary by Eric Korn, essay by Ian Jackson, provenance and binding descriptions.

A Dictionary of the English Language

Reference

Johnson, Samuel

Dictionaries & Thesauruses

Isaac Newton can be seen as a Renaissance colossus, a polymath straddling his age with one foot confidently planted in the Enlightenment and the other still mired in the Middle Ages. A firm believer in reason and the ability of human beings to understand how the universe worked ("the inward frame of bodies is not yet known to us," he writes in one place, with apparent confidence that eventually it would be), he also held some surprisingly reactionary ideas about God, and about how the truth of Holy Writ could be reconciled with Nature. A genius? Undoubtedly. The French philosophe Voltaire attended Newton’s funeral in 1727, later writing that "in a country where mortals are canonized, his discoveries might very well pass for miracles." It was in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that Isaac Newton's earliest optical paper was published in 1672. The result of experiments arising from Newton’s attempt to solve the problem of chromatic aberration in telescopes (he had been grinding his own lenses for nearly a decade), he concluded that white light contained all colors and that different colors were refracted to different degrees. His effort yielded a valuable practical result still in use today: Having determined that a very long ratio of aperture to length would result in spyglass tubes of unwieldy size, he solved the problem by inventing the reflecting telescope, described in Book I of Opticks. Commentary by Nicholas Humez, essay on the use of Latin in scholarly writing, searchable English and Latin live text.

Opticks (English and Latin Edition)

NEWTON, ISAAC

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Trattato delle Piante & Immagini de Sacri Edifizi di Terra Santa (Plans and images of the sacred edifices of the Holy Land) is a series of measured (exactly observed) drawings of buildings in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Cairo, executed by Bernardino Amico, a member of the Friars Minor of the Observance, between 1593 and 1597. The work was first printed in Rome in 1610 with engravings by Antonio Tempesta; a second edition, extensively revised by the author, was published in Florence in 1620 with etchings by Jacques Callot. Since the second edition represents the author’s final version of the text, it is the natural choice for reproduction here. Although the tradition of drawing the Christian holy places stretches back at least to 685 AD, the modern era in illustration properly begins with Amico’s drawings; no artist before him aspired to record Jerusalem and its monuments systematically and with topographical precision. Amico sometimes simplifies and alters what he observes, but scrupulously advises the reader of any distortion, as in Chapter XXXII, where he admits to "correcting" the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by substituting round arches for pointed ones. When the methodological investigation of ancient remains in Jerusalem began in the middle of the nineteenth century, Amico’s drawings were especially influential, and many scholars attested to his accuracy. Archaeological excavation in modern times has diminished the utility of the drawings, however, their value in the historical reconstruction of the shrines, and as witnesses to the former state of holy places altered and sometimes destroyed, has not waned. Commentary by Robin Halwas, searchable English translation.

Trattato delle Piante & Immagini de Sacri Edifizi di Terra Santa (Italian Edition)

Arts & Photography

Amico, Bernardino

The Manuale Tipografico of Giambattista Bodoni has been called the greatest type specimen book ever printed. Issued posthumously in 1818 at Parma by Bodoni’s devoted widow Margherita, the two-volume work contains a dazzling array of 142 roman alphabets with corresponding italics, numerous script and exotic typefaces, and a striking collection of flowers and ornaments––all beautifully printed on crisp, handmade paper. These typefaces and decorative materials were the culmination of more than forty years of assiduous devotion by Bodoni to the typographic arts, both in his capacity as printer to the Duke of Parma and as proprietor of his own private press and type foundry. Only 250 copies of this specimen book were printed, and surviving examples are now highly prized by collectors. The true value of the Manuale lies not in the fact that it is a splendidly printed and rare book, or even that it summarizes the life’s work of a celebrated type designer and printer who blithely sailed through some of the most tumultuous times in European history. Rather, its real significance is that from its pages speak the first successful modern types––more evolved, refined, and logical than those of Baskerville, yet not so chillingly formal and clinical as the letterforms of Bodoni’s great French rival Didot. Though Bodoni rarely made his types available to other printers, they came to have a profound influence on type design that is felt to this day. Commentary by David Pankow, searchable English translation.

Manuale Tipografico (Italian Edition)

Bodoni, Giambattista

Graphic Design

The Book of Mormon has generally come to most people as a surprise: to the farm boy beckoned from his sleep by an angel in the 1820s, to critics astonished that anyone would take the work seriously, and to millions of readers professing a personal witness that the book is not only authentic, but divine. It is unavoidably controversial and enigmatic, and if hundreds of millions of people have heard of this text, relatively few have examined it long enough to form an original opinion of what it may actually be. There are more than ten million Mormons worldwide, nearly half of them in the United States. Most of them have never seen this cornerstone of their religion as it was first published to the world. When a book is a foundation stone of faith, it will always be more than a collector’s item. As with many other famous books, this volume’s relatively nondescript mien belies the prominence which it attained. The Book of Mormon disappears comfortably on the shelf between other books of similar time and place until some unsuspecting browser turns the front board to reveal the famous title. There were works of equally imposing claim even in nineteenth-century America, and it would be unproductive to insist that this book is unique. Indeed, much of the Book of Mormon speaks not merely from its own era, but from its own decade and the very counties from which it emerged. This has been verified over the years in hundreds of texts examined and transcribed from the immediate world and culture of Joseph Smith. So when it is pointed out that the Book of Mormon also has its exceptional moments, readers of all persuasions may allow that surprises wait between its leaves. Commentary by Rick Grunder, searchable live text.

The Book of Mormon

History

Smith,Joseph

Americas

Areopagitica

When John Milton wrote Areopagitica in 1644, he was not making a contribution to the great debate on church versus state or the limits of toleration, except incidentally. Areopagitica was the result of the response to his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce the previous year. Advocating divorce seemed to strike at the roots of any religious society; it was universally condemned, and a divine of the Westminster Assembly demanded from the pulpit that Milton’s tract be burnt. The Stationers’ Company, less interested in theology than the preservation of the copyright system (Milton, like most of his contemporaries, had not obtained a license for the book), joined in the chorus of condemnation. In Areopagitica, Milton first of all defended himself and his right to express what he had written, and then he moved on to consider a new aspect of the problem, the rights of a book itself, independent of the intention of its author.  On the day the English Parliament abolished the Court of Star Chamber and the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission, freedom of the press, both as an idea and as a material fact, was born. It was to take some time to grow to maturity, and its first years were not without risk and dangers. Parliament had no intention of setting the press free––rather of transferring control into its own hands. But when it finally got around to tackling the problem two years later with the Ordinance of June 16, 1643, Pandora’s box had opened––political consciousness had come to the country, brought by the hundreds of books and pamphlets that had been printed in the interval. So not only did this Ordinance have little or no practical effect, it created a new and separate idea of debate among the mass of religious and political controversy: How free can speech be? It was against this background that Areopagitica was published in 1644.  Commentary by Nicolas Barker, searchable live text.

MILTON, JOHN

Europe

The short and unpretentious work here presented for the first time in digital format is one of a handful of undoubted classics in the history of Western scientific thought. Its English title is perhaps best rendered as "Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals," where "Exercise" has the sense of a formal academic argument; it is universally known to scholars by the abbreviated form of its Latin title, De Motu Cordis. Because it is brief, exquisitely well argued, and relatively nontechnical, De Motu Cordis is very probably the one and only great classic of Western science written before 1800 that is still widely read today. The publication of De Motu Cordis in 1628 marked the overthrow of a tradition of scientific explanation that had endured for almost 1,500 years, and introduced within the biological sciences a convention based on close observation and direct experimentation. Harvey’s rigorous and convincing logic yielded not only a statement of an epoch-making scientific discovery (the circulation of the blood), but a fascinating study of how an investigator should conduct experimental inquiries, and how to construct a maximally persuasive argument. There is remarkably little that one can point to, even 375 years later, that is factually "wrong." Commentary by Robert G. Frank, Jr., searchable English translation and Latin live text.

Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Latin and English Edition)

William Harvey

Galileo Galilei’s earthshaking book, Sidereus Nuncius (The starry messenger), was a definitive moment in the Renaissance’s departure from ancient cosmology and its assumptions. Entering the debate between the astronomies of Ptolemy and Copernicus, Sidereus Nuncius provided rich and detailed evidence for Copernican heliocentrism. That evidence came from a telescope that Galileo modified and improved for his lunar observations and with which, most significantly, he also discovered four moons circling Jupiter. Sidereus Nuncius contains an introductory passage about the telescope, a section on Galileo’s lunar observations, a description of how the planets and the fixed stars appeared through his telescope, a daily log of sightings of Jupiter and its satellites, and a brief conclusion in which Galileo contended that his discoveries answered some of the objections to Copernicus’ theory, promising that the reader could expect more news from the heavens soon. 
The age of the telescope began modestly with a patent application in 1608 for a three-powered spyglass, filed with the Dutch Republic by a spectacle maker from Middleburg, Hans Lipperhey. News of the device traveled quickly to other parts of Europe, and when Galileo heard about it in the spring of 1609, he built his own instrument, a three-powered spyglass with a convex objective lens and a concave ocular lens that he bought in a spectacle-maker’s shop. By the end of August, he presented an eight-powered telescope of his own devising to the Venetian senate. By November, Galileo had fashioned a twenty-powered telescope, and with it he undertook to observe the Moon, discovering that its surface was rugged and mountainous rather than perfect, as would befit a heavenly body according to classical cosmology. Galileo began writing up his lunar research in January 1610. 
Commentary by Albert Van Helden, searchable English translation and Latin live text.

Sidereus Nuncius (Latin Edition)

Galilei, Galileo

Experiments in Electricity

Science & Math

FRANKLIN, BENJAMÍN

History & Philosophy

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