APOLLONIUS OF PERGA (fl. 2nd-3rd centuries BCE). Conicorum libri quattuor. [Bound with:] SERENUS OF ANZI (fl. 4th century). Libri duo. Unus de sectione cylindri, alter de sectione coni. Bologna: Alessandro Benacci, 1566. Folio (280 x 193mm). Numerous...

APOLLONIUS OF PERGA (fl. 2nd-3rd centuries BCE). Conicorum libri quattuor. [Bound with:] SERENUS OF ANZI (fl. 4th century). Libri duo. Unus de sectione cylindri, alter de sectione coni. Bologna: Alessandro Benacci, 1566. Folio (280 x 193mm). Numerous woodcut diagrams, woodcut initials (some worming in gutter at center of volume). 20th-century vellum. Provenance: deleted early inscription on second title.

— Conicorum lib. V. VI. VII. & Archimedis assumptorum liber. Florence: Giuseppe Cocchini, 1661. Folio (311 x 210mm). Half-title, errata leaf, title printed in red and black. Woodcut diagrams in text, woodcut initials, typographic ornaments (worming in some margins). 19th-century vellum.

The most important early edition of Apollonius’s work on conic sections—with the editio princeps of books V-VII, believed lost until their translation from the Arabic; "the culmination of Greek geometry” (Norman). This edition, edited by Federico Commandino, includes the commentaries of Pappos of Alexandria and Eutocius of Ascalon, as well as the first Latin printing of the works of Serenus of Anzi. Only the first four books of Apollonius's text survive in the original Greek; the last three books were rediscovered in an Arabic paraphrase acquired by the Medici in the early seventeenth century and shortly thereafter translated into Latin by Abraham Ecchellensis. Book V is particularly important for its proof of the construction of the evolute curve. This edition, edited by Giovanni Borelli, also contains Archimedes’s Liber assumptorum translated by Ecchellensis from an Arabic paraphrase by Thebit Ben-Kora. Adams A-1310; Brunet I:347; Dibner Heralds of Science 101; Grolier/Horblit 4; Norman 57 and 58.

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