A preliminary census of copies of the first edition of Newton’s Principia (1687)

ABSTRACT

When Henry Macomber published his census of owners of the first edition of the Principia in 1953, he believed the edition to be small, ‘perhaps not more than 250 copies’, an estimate that still enjoys currency. Lower estimates of the size of the first edition of the Principia were based partly on assessments regarding an inhospitable market for highly technical mathematical books, and partly on the presumption that the vaunted incomprehensibility of the Principia would have militated against a sizeable edition. Our preliminary census more than doubles the number of identified copies, to 387—suggesting a much larger print run than commonly assumed – as well as encourages us to believe that there existed a wider, and competent, readership of the Principia from the start. The long-standing assumption regarding the recondite nature of Newton's science as presented in the Principia, together with claims concerning the scarcity of the book, brought many scholars to assume that Newton's masterpiece exerted little influence before the 1730s. The new empirical evidence presented in our census enables a reassessment of the early diffusion of the Principia in Europe which, in turn, would necessitate a major refinement of our understanding of the contribution of Newtonianism to Enlightenment science.

KEYWORDS:

• Isaac Newton
• Principia
• Edmond Halley
• census
• Newtonian science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, most recently, J. B. Shank, Before Voltaire: The French Origins of ‘Newtonian’ Mechanics, 1680–1715 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018).

2 The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, eds. H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and Laura Tilling, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77), 2:481.

3 Stephen P. Rigaud, Historical Essay on the First Publication of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1838); W. W. Rous Ball, An Essay on Newton's ‘Principia’ (London: Macmillan, 1893); I. Bernard Cohen, Introduction to Newton's Principia (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

4 Henry P. Macomber, ‘A Census of the Owners of Copies of 1687 First Edition of Newton's Principia’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 47 (1953), 269–300; A. N. L. Munby, ‘The Distribution of the First Edition of Newton's “Principia”’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 10 (1952), 28–39 (p. 38); D. T. Whiteside, ‘The Preshistory of the Principia from 1664 to 1686’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 45 (1991), 11–61 (p. 60n). See also Henry P. Macomber, ‘A Comparison of the Variations and Errors in Copies of the First Edition of Newton’s Principia, 1687’ Isis 42 (1951), 230–2. The collation Macomber proposed remains a desideratum.

5 Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (New York: Walker & Company, 2004), 127–8.

6 Newton, Correspondence, 1:147, 2:241; S. P. Rigaud, Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1841), 2:14.

7 Rob Iliffe, Milo Keynes, and Rebekah Higgitt, Early Biographies of Isaac Newton, 1660-1885, 2 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006), 1:176; Willem-Jacob ’s Gravesande, Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, Confirmed by Experiments, or an Introduction to Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy, trans. J. T. Desaguliers (London: J. Senex and W. Taylor, 1720), ii.

8 Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols (London: A Millar, 1756–57), 4:474, 479–80.

9 Newton, Correspondence, 2:431.

10 Birch, The History of the Royal Society, 4:484, 486.

11 Correspondence and Papers of Edmond Halley, ed. Eugene F. Macpike (repr. New York: Arno Press, 1975), 62–4, 68–9; The Correspondence of John Flamsteed, the First Astronomer Royal, eds. Eric G Forbes, Lesley Murdin, and Frances Willmoth, 3 vols. (Bristol: Institute of Physics, 1995–2002), 2:353; Cohen, Introduction to Newton's Principia, 131, 136.

12 Flamsteed, Correspondence, 2:466, 353; Papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society 1683–1709, ed. K. Theodore Hoppen, 2 vols (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2008), 2:654, 656.

13 Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres Completes, 22 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888–1950), 9:167–9.

14 Flamsteed, Correspondence, 3:100.

15 Philosophical Transactions, 16 (1686–1687), 291–7.

16 Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique, 8 (March 1688), 436–50. For the review, see James L. Axtell, ‘Locke's Review of the Principia’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 20 (1965), 152–61; J. R. Milton, ‘Locke's Publications in the Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (2011), 451–72 (pp. 455–6). For Le Clerc's copy, see Catalogus Librorum Theologicorum, Historicorum, Philosophicorum, Philologicorum &c. … Joannis Clerici (Amsterdam: J. Wetstein & G. Smith, 1735), 63.

17 Steffen Ducheyne, ‘Adriaen Verwer (1654/5–1717) and the First Edition of Isaac Newton's Principia in the Dutch Republic’, Notes and Records (2019), 1–27.

18 Acta Eruditorum (June 1688), 303–15; I. Bernard Cohen, ‘The Review of the First Edition of Newton's Principia in the Acta Eruditorum, with notes on the other reviews’, in The Investigation of Difficult Things: Essays on Newton and the History of the Exact Sciences, eds. Peter M. Harman, Alan E. Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 323–53 (pp. 324–27, 330–36).

19 Journal des sçavans (August 1688): 128; Shank, Before Voltaire 25, 117–18.

20 Early Biographies of Isaac Newton, 1:134.

21 Edward Millington, Bibliotheca Cudworthiana (London, 1691), 28.

22 David R. Bellhouse, Abraham De Moivre. Setting the Stage for Classical Probability and Its Applications (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2011), 40.

23 Newton, Correspondence, 2:481; 3:271.

24 Huygens, Oeuvres Completes, 9:305; A. Rupert Hall, ‘Further Newton Correspondence’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 37 (1982), 7–34 (pp. 11–12).

25 A Catalogue of the … Libraries of … Sir Christopher Wren … and Christopher Wren, Esq; his Son (London, 1748), 13.

26 Newton, Correspondence, 2:482.

27 Newton, Correspondence, 3:271, 291–2.

28 Enrico Pasini, ‘Korrespondenten von G. W. Leibniz: 12. Detlev Clüver geb. um 1645 in Schleswig -gest. den 21. Februar 1708 in Hamburg’, Studia Leibnitiana 26 (1994), 108–24 (p. 116n.29 for his library); John Bullord, A Catalogue of Books of Two Eminent Mathematicians … which will be exposed to sale by way of auction … 21st of … May, 1691, 7 (lot 111).

29 Flamsteed, Correspondence, 2:366.

30 The Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of London, 2 vols (London: J. Nichols, son, and Bentley, 1818), 1:207.

31 The 1,336 guilders that van Waesberge owed Smith was obviously not just for the Principia.

32 P. G. Hoftijzer, ‘The Leiden Bookseller Pieter van der Aa (1659–1733) and the International Book Trade’, in Le magasin de l’univers - The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade, eds. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, H. Bots, Paul G. Hoftijzer, O.S. Lankhorst (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 169–84 (p. 177 and n.20); P. G. Hoftijzer, ‘Het Nederlandse boekenbedrijf en de verspreiding van Engelse wetenschap in de zeventiende en vroege achttiende eeuw’, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis 5 (1998), 59–71 (p. 70).

33 Ducheyne, ‘Adriaen Verwer’, 5.

34 For Smith's relations with the Chetham Library, see Matthew Yeo, The Acquisition of Books by Chetham's Library 1655–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

35 Catalogus librorum domi forísque impressorum (London: S. Smith and B. Walford, 1695), 49.

36 Bibliotheca Hookiana (London, 1703), 20; John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols (London: For the Author, 1812–1815), 3:322n.

37 Isaac Newton, The Principia. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1999), 399.

38 Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest. A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 750.

39 John Wilcox, A catalogue of the library of the Hon^ble Samuel Molyneux (London, 1730), 58.

40 Samuel Baker, A Catalogue of the Entire and Valuable Library of Martin Folkes (London, 1756), 93. The price of Folkes's other copy is not recorded. It resurfaced and sold in 1967. See No. 318.

41 A Catalogue of the … Libraries of … Sir Christopher Wren … and Christopher Wren, 13 (price given on the inserted previous page); S. Baker and G. Leigh, A Catalogue of the Large and Valuable Libraries of … Henry Pemberton … and James Wilson (London, 1772), 92.

42 D. T. Whiteside, ‘The mathematical principles underlying Newton's Principia Mathematica’, Journal for the History of Astronomy 1 (1970), 116–38 (at p. 117).

43 Newton, Correspondence, 2:492, 501; 3:7; For changes Newton made in the second edition of the Principia in response to Clerke's objections, see Edith Sylla, ‘Compounding Ratios: Bradwardine, Oresme, and the first edition of Newton's Principia’, in Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences: Essays in Honour of I. Bernard Cohen, ed. Everett Mendelsohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 11–43 (pp. 12–17).

44 Correspondance de Pierre Bayle, eds. Elizabeth Larousse; Athony McKenny, et al., 13 vols. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999–2016), 7:431.

45 Early Biographies of Isaac Newton, 1:234.

46 Bibliothèque choisie 18, no. 3 (1709): 346–401 (pp. 379–80). For de Volder, see Andrea Strazzoni, Burchard de Volder and the Age of the Scientific Revolution (Cham: Springer, 2019).

47 Newton, Correspondence, 7:105.

48 E. A. Fellmann, G. W. Leibniz-Marginalia in Newtoni Principia Mathematica (1687) (Paris: Vrin, 1973); Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Equivalence and Priority: Newton versus Leibniz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).