History of Astronomy - Charting the heavens in type: the oldest books in the RAS Library, by Dr Sian Prosser

Our speaker this evening, Dr Sian Prosser, is surrounded by books. As curator and manager of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Library, this is not a great surprise. The RAS has some 25,000 books and volumes dating back to before 1500, making the collection one of the oldest historical astronomy archives in the world. For 45 minutes Sian took us on a journey through the archive, and the people behind the various donations to it, from Lyon, Strasbourg, Milan, Bologna, and to Nuremberg and Leipzig: historical centres for scientific and astronomical publishing in the early days of the subject.

However, it was the rarest of the books, the incunables (no, not in any way related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe), that generated the most interest. These are the volumes that were printed before 1501, often from publishing houses in Venice or Augsburg, and numbering just 56 in the RAS collection. Authors of these highly historical texts include Euclid, Ptolemy, and Peuerbach. Occasionally colour was used to better explain astronomical and physical concepts with Kalendarium (1499) by Regiomontanus being an early volume to be printed in two colours from the outset rather than having colour details painted in by hand later on.

Preserving these rare and important texts (and a number of early photographs such as solar eclipses) was a topic of lively discussion after Sian’s talk, including how best to store and preserve such delicate artefacts printed in the time before acid-free paper. Many of the books remain in almost pristine conditions, whereas others feature notes and repairs – testimony to times when books were valuable items. A dedicated bookcase once used for this purpose now holds volumes of lesser importance, the originals being kept in climate-controlled premises, or digitised. Either way, the library of the RAS will be a resource for many years to come.

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