Rare Books
The first illustration of chemical atoms and their combination
Woodcut of early distilling apparatus
Title page
Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae solius verae (1609)
Epigram I: "The wind has carried it in his belly."
Epigram IX: "Lock the tree with the old man in a bedewed house, and by eating of its fruit he will become young."
Epigram XXI: "The King swims in the sea, crying with a loud voice: 'He who rescues me shall have a mighty reward!'"
The smelting operation of a mine as depicted in a richly illustrated early mining book
Title page with woodcut showing laboratory scene
Frontispiece engraving showing the chemical laboratory and lecture room in the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania
An early alchemist's marginal annotations and notes in the margins of Lull's text
Title page with woodcut border illustrating uses of "pyrotechnics" in mining, smelting, and artillery
Argonauts using a sheepskin to capture gold from a spring, hence "golden fleece"
Donato d’Eremita, Dell' elixir vitae (1624)
Description des expériences de la machine aérostatique de MM. de Montgolfier (Paris: Cuchet, 1783).
Frontispiece engraving showing Montgolfier's hot-air balloon taking flight
Frontispiece illustration of Nollet’s “electric boy” experiment, in which a boy hanging from insulating silk threads is given an electric charge.
Expériences et observations sur l'électricité faites à Philadelphie en Amérique par M. Benjamin Franklin & communiquées dans plusieurs lettres à M. P. Collinson, de la Societé Royale de Londre (2 vols., Paris: Durand, 1756).
The strength of the vacuum illustrated by the failure of two teams of horses to separate the two halves of an evacuated sphere
Otto Tachenius, Hippocrates chymicus (1677)
The only surviving prospectus for John Dalton's New System of Chemical Philosophy
Allegorical title page engraving showing ships returning with new knowledge from beyond the Pillars of Hercules
Instruction sur l'établissement des nitrières et sur la fabrication du salpêtre, publiée par ordre du roi, par les Régisseurs généraux des Poudres & Salpêtres (Paris : De l'Imprimerie Royale, 1777)
The map of the known world in 1493
Title page, hand colored
The sunflower clock, which purportedly uses heliotropism to measure time
Manuscript from the Régie des poudres [Gunpowder Administration] signed by directors Le Faucheux, Le Faucheux Desaunois, and Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
A horse trussed for lowering down a mineshaft
Boyle's pioneering air pump. The air in the glass sphere above is extracted using a plunger attached to the geared bar in the cylinder in the center.
The first periodic table
Hooke's Micrographia (1665) and van Leeuwenhoek's Arcana naturae (1695) open to illustrations of fleas
Prix extraordinaire proposé par l'Académie Royale des Sciences [sur la fabrication de salpeter], pour l'année 1778
Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal imprimé par ordre du roi (Paris: L'Imprimerie royale, 1784).
Solar prominences as observed by Zöllner
Entry for "hempe"
Entry on the unicorn
The title page of a rare first edition of Boyle's most famous chemical work
Engraving showing different sorts of furnaces and distilling apparatus
Frontispiece engraving showing a plant for the production of coal gas
Plate showing all varieties of portable chemical apparatus
Experiment designed to ascertain the amount of gas contained in solid vegetable matter