Ultra-rare first edition book from Galileo heading to auction
A small library’s worth of rare medieval and Renaissance books are heading to auction on July 9. The expansive lot includes a portable Magna Carta, an early scientific encyclopedia, a surgical codex, and one of the oldest surviving Sephardic Torah scrolls. But according to Christies’s Auction House, one manuscript is the first of its kind to go up for sale in over a century: a copy of the first pseudonymous astronomical text co-written by Galileo Galilei. The evening of October 9, 1604, offered an unexpected and ultimately revolutionary moment for astronomy. Without warning, a star in the night sky suddenly illuminated brighter than nearly every other celestial object around it. Although inexplicable at the time, German astronomer Johannes Kepler spent weeks studying the event as it ultimately reached a peak brightness greater than Jupiter. What is now known as Kepler’s Supernova remained visible to the naked eye for 18 months, and...