Nullius in Verba: The Royal Society's Two Earliest Books

[First posted on the University of Melbourne Library Collections blog]

Earlier this week the Royal Society announced the launch later this year of Royal Society Open Science, an open access peer-reviewed journal publishing scholarly research in all fields scientific and mathematical. The move is seen by the Society’s president, Sir Paul Nurse, as a necessary step to keep pace with the changing face of publishing in the twenty-first century.

Changes in the publishing field is something the Royal Society has seen a lot of throughout its long history. The august body received a Royal Charter to publish relevant works in 1662 (two years after its official founding in November 1660), and will observe the 350th anniversary of its journal Philosophical Transactions in March 2015.

With the recent open access announcement and next year’s anniversary of Philosophical Transactions in mind, this week’s post highlights the Royal Society’s two earliest books: John Evelyn’s Sylva and Robert Hooke’s Micrographia; first editions of each are held by University of Melbourne Special Collections.[1]

Sylva
First printed in 1664, Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber was the first work sponsored officially by the Royal Society and the first treatise in English dedicated entirely to forestry.[2] Its author, John Evelyn (1620–1706), writer, intellectual and founding member of the Royal Society, is perhaps best known for his long-running diary kept from 1640 to 1706.

Evelyn initially presented Sylva as a paper to the Royal Society in 1662. The published text sought to encourage tree-planting after the destruction wrought by the Civil War and, it has been argued, to ensure a supply of timber for England’s developing navy and add a further boost to the economy. Evelyn’s book proved highly popular with its intended audience, namely the gentry and aristocracy, who took from it the idea of gardening as an aesthetic pursuit, and his discourse was positively received on the Continent where it stimulated new methods of forest management.[3] Today Sylva is recognised as one of the most influential works on the subject of tree conservation.

First ed. title-page with the arms of the Royal Society

The first edition of Sylva contained two appendixes: Pomona: or, an Appendix Concerning Fruit-Trees in Relation to Cider, one of the earliest English essays on cider, and the Kalendarium Hortense: or, Gard’ners Almanac: Directing What He is To Do Monethly [sic] Throughout the Year, which was often reprinted separately and proved to be Evelyn’s most popular work.[4]

Title-page of Evelyn’s Kalendarium Hortense

Micrographia
The second text printed for the Royal Society was Robert Hooke’s groundbreaking Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, published in 1665. Hooke (1635–1703), a natural philosopher and polymath, perfected the compound microscope and put the instrument to good use. His observations touched on a number of subjects, from combustion and diffraction of light, to fossils and artificial silk, and his description of the honeycomb-like structure of a cork gave us the word ‘cell’ to describe the basic biological unit of living organisms. 

Micrographia is perhaps most widely known today for its illustrations. The book includes 57 microscopic and 3 telescopic observations, describing for the first time ‘a polyzoon, the minute markings of fish scales, the structure of the bee’s sting [and wings], the compound eyes of the fly, the gnat and its larvae, the structure of feathers, the flea and the louse’.[5] These enlarged images of such minute creatures (Hooke’s louse measures 45.7 cm in length) are as startling today as they must have been for Hooke’s contemporaries over 300 years ago.

Compound eye of the fly (Schema 24)

A flea (Schema 34)

A louse (Schema 35)

Like Sylva, Hooke’s Micrographia was an immediate success. It was read by Samuel Pepys, who mentioned the book three times in his diary for January 1664/5 and called it ‘the most ingenious book I have ever read in my life’ (Pepys was also a member of the Royal Society).[6] The text, particularly Hooke’s observations on light and the spectrum, was also studied by Isaac Newton who drew inspiration from it for his Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light (London, 1704).

—

[1] John Evelyn, Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber (London: Printed by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, Printers to the Royal Society, [1664]); purchased by the Friends of the Baillieu Library
 
Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (London: Printed by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, Printers to the Royal Society, [1665])

[2] Special Collections also holds copies of the 1670 second edition and 1679 third edition of Sylva, both of which were printed for the Royal Society

[3] http://royalsociety.org/events/2013/sustainability/ [Accessed 19.2.2014]

[4] Diana H. Hook and Jeremy Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Jeremy Norman & Co., Inc, 1991), i:271

[5] John Carter and Percy H. Muir, eds., Printing and the Mind of Man … (London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1967 ed.), 88 (no. 147)

[6] Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys … 11 vols. (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd, 1970-1976), vi:2, 17, 18

Ephemera #1: 'Printed on the Thames being Frozen'

Last week I returned from Melbourne and a very enjoyable/ informative Rare Books Summer School session on the importance of printed ephemera for historians of the book. On the flight back to Dunedin, my thoughts turned to some interesting examples of ephemera in the Heritage Collections, and so decided to begin a new series around this interesting, wide-ranging, and subjective topic.

The first in the series is the earliest piece of printed ephemera in the Reed Collection, a frost fair keepsake printed on the River Thames in 1683/4.

The Thames had frozen over near London and Westminster a number of times since at least 1092. According to Brian McMullin, the winter of 1683/4 was 'the earliest recorded occasion on which printers took to the ice', and it must have been a true test of ingenuity to stabilize the presses for printing.

The keepsake in the Reed Collection was printed for the attorney Richard Blackall (d. 1743) of Wallingford, Berkshire (Wallingford is now located in Oxfordshire). Blackall later used the keepsake as a book label, affixing it to the front pastedown of a quarto Bible and Prayer Book (London, 1712; ESTC T89271) acquired by the Dunedin Public Library in 1973.

Unfortunately, the name of the printer who produced this keepsake was not included. The only frost fair printer known to McMullin by name is George Croom, active in London between 1671 and 1707, who printed a variety of frost fair keepsakes including one for Charles II and the Royal Family on 31 January 1684. Phrasing and typographical differences, however, suggest that Croom was either not the printer of the Blackall keepsake or allowed some visitors to try their hand at setting their own type.

The 1683/4 Thames frost fair was documented by the writer and diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706), who wandered its booths constructed of blankets and poles, and recorded in his diary for 24 January 1684:

The frost still continuing more & more severe, the Thames before London was planted with bothes in formal streetes, as in a Citty, or Continual faire, all sorts of Trades & shops furnished, & full of Commodities, even to a Printing presse, where the People & Ladys tooke a fansy to have their names Printed & the day & yeare set downe, when printed on the Thames: This humour tooke so universaly, that 'twas estimated the Printer gained five pound a day, for printing a line onley, at six-pence a Name, besides what he gott by Ballads &c: (4:361-2).

See Brian McMullin's "An Excursion into Printed Keepsakes: III: 'Printed on the Thames Being Frozen'" in the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin vol. 11 (1987; issued Nov. 1989) for further details on the printing of frost fair keepsakes.

For the Evelyn reference see The Diary of John Evelyn edited by Esmond de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1955).

For other seventeenth-century printed ephemera in the Reed Collection, see my post 'Upon beat of Drumme' from early last year.