Books

Frankfurt: Erasmus Kempfer for Godefrid Tampach, 1622. First edition. KEPLER’S GEOMETRICAL COSMOS. Second, enlarged, edition of the Mysterium cosmographicum (first, 1596), Kepler’s first scientific book, “the first unabashedly Copernican treatise since De revolutionibus itself” (Gingerich in DSB), which laid “the foundation of his vast later astronomical work [and] immediately made him famous in scientific circles, and got him into contact with Galileo and Tycho Brahe” (Caspar). “Kepler maintained the basic ideas of the work of his youth throughout his life. In the dedication to the present edition he proudly points out his early achievement: ‘As if an oracle from the heavens had been dictated to me,’ he writes in fond memory. He realises that ‘almost all astronomical books which I have published since that time relate to one of the main chapters in this little book, representing an expansion, or an improvement upon it.’ Thus the present edition is especially…