NEW YORK, NY.- This October, Sotheby's will present the first installment of Reason and Revolution: Extraordinary Works from a Distinguished Private Collection, a dedicated single-owner auction devoted to the history of scientific thought. Headlined by first editions from Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, alongside a rare surviving manuscript in Newton's own hand, the sale reunites landmark works that, in several cases, have not appeared on the market in more than three decades. A number of these highlights passed through the same distinguished library of Sturgis S. Dunham, and his son, Robert S. Dunham, before entering the present collection, underscoring the depth and continuity of scholarship behind the group as a whole.

Offered under the title Reason and Revolution, the auction represents the first chapter of a two-part presentation of the collection. This October's sale traces the history of scientific inquiry from Copernicus's heliocentric model through Newton's laws of motion; a second sale this December will turn to the founding of the American nation, with further highlights from the collection to be unveiled later this year.

“There is something remarkable about holding the actual page where a scientific revolution happened, not a later account of it, but the object itself, like the sheet where you can watch Newton work through a calculation in his own hand. How often do we get to stand that close to the moment a discovery became permanent?”

Dr. Kalika Sands, Sotheby's Vice President, Head of Books & Manuscripts, Americas

Collection Highlights

Nicolaus Copernicus
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
Nuremberg: Johannes Petreius, 1543
Estimate: $700,000–1,000,000

First edition of the single most significant scientific publication of the sixteenth century, and, by the estimation of historian Bern Dibner, one of the three books that most fundamentally reshaped humanity's understanding of its place in the universe, alongside Newton's Principia and Darwin's On the Origin of Species. In proposing that the earth orbits the sun rather than standing at the center of creation, Copernicus overturned nearly two thousand years of Ptolemaic cosmology and, in the words of Printing and the Mind of Man, effectively destroyed the anthropocentric view of the universe that had prevailed since antiquity.





The book's reception was anything but positive: in 1616 it was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, and it would take Galileo's forceful defense of the Copernican model--and more than two centuries of accumulating evidence--before the ban was quietly lifted in 1835.

Euclid
Praeclarissimus Liber Elementorum in Artem Geometrie
Venice: Erhardt Ratdolt, 25 May 1482
Estimate: $240,000–360,000

The first printed edition of Euclid's Elements, a text that has remained in continuous use longer than nearly any other book in history. As the scholar Sir Thomas Heath observed, future generations would “come back to it again and again as they tire of the variegated substitutes for it.”

Printed by Erhardt Ratdolt in Venice, this edition was the first to successfully integrate the geometric diagrams—more than 500 of them—directly alongside Euclid's text, a technical achievement in early printing that set the model for how mathematical works would be produced for centuries afterward. Based on the standard medieval Latin translation from the Arabic by Adelard of Bath, as later revised by Campanus of Novara, this copy carries provenance from the Panciera family of Verona.

Galileo Galilei
Sidereus Nuncius
Venice: T. Baglioni, 1610
Estimate: $250,000-350,000

First edition of Galileo's account of his earliest observations through the telescope, including his discovery of the four moons of Jupiter and the mountainous, cratered surface of the moon. The book that established Galileo as the founder of modern observational astronomy.

Over the course of a slim, urgently written volume, Galileo unveiled nine major discoveries: the irregular, mountainous surface of the moon; the true nature of the Milky Way as a dense field of stars invisible to the naked eye; and, most consequentially, four satellites orbiting Jupiter, which he named the “Medicea Sidera” in a calculated bid for the patronage of Cosimo II de' Medici.

Galileo describes, on a single page of the book, the exact moment on January 11, 1610, when he corrected his own earlier count of Jupiter's moons from three to four, a small but electric passage documenting real-time scientific discovery as it happened.

Johannes Kepler
Astronomia Nova
Prague/Heidelberg: E. Vogelin, 1609
Estimate: $400,000–600,000

First edition of Kepler's masterwork, in which he set out the first two of his three laws of planetary motion: that planets travel in ellipses rather than perfect circles, and that they sweep out equal areas in equal times.

Where Copernicus had still measured planetary motion against the center of the earth's orbit, Kepler was the first to refer it to the sun itself, a shift that, as Bern Dibner observed, paved the way for a true center of gravitational force and made Newton's celestial mechanics possible three generations later.

This copy descends from the estate of Sturgis S. Dunham and has not been seen on the market in decades.

Isaac Newton
Autograph manuscript worksheet
Cambridge, 4–8 May 1694
Estimate: $500,000–700,000

A rare manuscript in Newton's own hand, revisiting calculations related to his Principia and produced during his celebrated visit with the astronomer David Gregory at Cambridge. Here, he reworks a calculation he had first made nearly a decade earlier concerning the shape of a solid of least resistance moving through a fluid, a problem whose solution he had published in Book II of the Principia in 1687.

Scientific manuscripts by Newton are exceptionally scarce in private hands; those relating to the Principia are almost never seen on the market.

Isaac Newton
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
London: Joseph Streater, for the Royal Society, 1687
Estimate: $500,000–700,000

First edition, first issue, of the single most influential work in the history of science. In the Principia, Newton set out the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, providing, for the first time, a single mathematical framework unifying the mechanics of the heavens and the earth.

The result was the great synthesis of the physical world, demonstrating that everything from falling dust to the orbit of the moon to the tides obeyed the same universal law, expressed for the first time in rigorous mathematical terms. This copy, like the Astronomia Nova above, descends from the estate of Sturgis S. Dunham.

Additional Highlights

• Tycho Brahe
Astronomiae instauratae mechanica
Wandsbek: [for the author], 1598
Estimate: $200,000–300,000

• Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
“On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties, and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection”
London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, and Williams and Norgate [for the Linnean Society], 1858
Estimate: $150,000–250,000