April 30, 1999
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Cynthia Requardt
cynthia.requardt@jhu.edu
(410)516-5493

ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS:
EARLY ASTRONOMY BOOKS ON DEPOSIT IN SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

"If I have seen a little farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."

-Isaac Newton

The Special Collections Department of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library has become home recently to twenty-one volumes of mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century astronomy books, all "giants" in the field. The collection, put on deposit by Professor Ethan T. Vishniac and Dean Ilene Busch-Vishniac, includes Peter Apian's 1540 Cosmographia replete with beautiful volvelles, or moveable paper circles, used to calculate planetary activities such as the rising and setting of the sun and moon, and tidal movement. Nicolaus Copernicus' 1566 second edition of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, in which he mathematically resolves planetary orbits and thereby shifts our understanding of the rotation of the universe from the earth to the sun, figures prominently, as well.

Among the twenty-one volumes, there are also five books by Johannes Kepler, printed between 1604 and 1621, two of which describe Kepler's three laws of planetary motion, laws which further refine Copernicus' work and later make possible Newtonian celestial mechanics.

Thanks to these books and others by Brahe, Gassendi, Huygens, Galileo, Ptolemy and Sacro Bosco, all true early giants of astronomy, Special Collections researchers will be able to stand a little taller and see a little further.

The Sheridan Libraries encompass the Milton S. Eisenhower Library and its collections at the Hutzler Reading Room, Garrett Library and the George Peabody Library.

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