The MELVIN E. JAHN COLLECTION of Early Geoscience 1550-1850 Offered by SCHOYER’S BOOKS and SERENDIPITY BOOKS The Melvin E. Jahn Collection of Early Geoscience 1550-1850 With a special concentration on Paleontology, Conchology, Mineralogy, and Private Museums of Natural History. Some Significant Books: A List. page 3 Melvin Jahn, Bibliophile . pages 4 – 5 Survey of the Jahn Collection . pages 6 – 8 Catalogue of the Collection arranged chronologically . pages 9 – 89 Author Index arranged alphabetically, with values. pages 90 – 96 References Cited . pages 97 – 98 SCHOYER’S BOOKS and SERENDIPITY BOOKS, ABAA/ILAB —Schoyer’s Books— —Serendipity Books— PO Box 9471& 1201 University Ave. Berkeley, CA 94709 Berkeley, CA 94702 510-548-8009 510-841-7455 [email protected] [email protected] “Nature reserves many things from our knowledge.” —Ole Worm, Museum Wormianum, 1655 Essays: Ian Jackson Catalogue: Marc Selvaggio (Schoyer’s Books) © Schoyer’s Books, 2004 Design: Andrea Latham This is a revised edition of the original sales prospectus. Although the collection is only available as a single unit, an approximate value for each item appears [set in brackets] in the Author Index section. Schoyer’s Books & Serendipity Books Are Members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. 2 The Jahn Collection of Early Geoscience Some Significant Books in the Jahn Collection Aldrovandi, Ulisse. Opera Omnia. Bologna, 1599-1667. Complete 13-volume set in uniform contemporary bindings. Beringer, Johann Bartholomew Adam. Lithographiae Wirceburgenis. Both the first (1726) and second (1767) editions. Boodt, Anselmus de. Gemmarum et lapidum historia. First, second, and third editions (1609, 1636, 1647), each in contemporary binding. Buonanni, Filippo et al. Rerum Naturalium Historia…in Museo Kircheriano, 1773-82. Burtin, Francois-Xavier de. Oryctographie de Bruxelles, 1784 issue with hand-colored plates. Ellis, John. An essay towards a natural history of the corallines, 1755—presentation copy from Ellis to his illustrator, Georg Dionysius Ehret. Gualtieri, Niccolo. Index Testarum Conchyliorum, 1742. Hebenstreit, Johann Ernst. Museum Ricterianum, 1743—the exceedingly rare first issue with hand-colored plates, one of five known copies. Lhwyd, Edward. Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia—the rare 1699 first edition. Lister, Martin. Historiae Animalium Angliae, 1678; Conchyliorum bivalvium, 1696; and his magnificently illustrated Historiae sive Synopsis methodicae conchyliorum, 1770. Mercati, Michele. Metallotheca, both the first (1717) and second (1719) editions. Moscardo, Ludovico. Note overo Memorie del museo de Ludovico Moscardo, 1656. Rashleigh, Philip. Specimens of British Minerals. London: Bulmer, 1797-1802. Rumpf, Georg Eberhard. D’Amboinische Rariteitkammer, 1705 and Thesaurus Imaginum Piscium Testaceorum, 1739. Scheuchzer, Johann Jacob. Geestelyke Natuurkunde, 1728-1738. Fifteen vols. in six. Volta, Giovanni S. Ittiolitologia Veronese del Museo Bozziano, Verona, 1796. Willughby, Francis. De Historia Piscium Libri Quatuor, 1686. Worm, Ole. Museum Wormianum, 1655. Both issues of the first edition, including Cuvier’s copy. 3 SCHOYER’S BOOKS and SERENDIPITY BOOKS, ABAA/ILAB Melvin Jahn, Bibliophile A Note on the Collector and His Library Melvin Jahn (1938-2003) was the youngest and the last of the great Berkeley scientific book collectors. It has often been noted that there is a certain contagion to book-collecting. Influential bibliographies, historic events or inspiring personalities can establish a vogue. Admiration, emulation and rivalry sustain it, but when the stimulus is withdrawn, or the circle of enthusiasts is dispersed or dies off, the epidemic is over. At the University of California it ran for just over a century. The taste for scientific books was well established at Berkeley in the 1890’s, by the botanists E.L. Greene, W.L. Jepson, H.M. Hall and W.A. Setchell, each collecting within their specialty, from a taxonomic and historical point of view. The taste became a mania by the 1920’s, with the advent of two omnivorous collectors, Charles Atwood Kofoid and Herbert McLean Evans. Kofoid (1865-1947), a zoologist, specialized in natural history, and by unrelenting accumulation died with 80,000 or 100,000 volumes. They were donated to the University Library, although duplicates were sold, eventually enriching the Jahn Collection. Evans (1882-1971), the discoverer of Vitamin E, by incessant ebb and flow, never had more than a few thousand volumes on hand at any given moment, but circulated some 20,000 books in the course of his career. Bridson and Jackson’s Naturalists’ Libraries lists sixteen catalogues from which Evans’s books were recorded and dispersed between 1930 and 1975. Every leading American history of science library has at least a few volumes that once were his. Still more influential was Evans’s 1934 exhibition catalogue of First editions of epochal achievements in the history of science, listing 116 works. This small booklet, succinctly annotated, with its clear purpose and manageable number of landmark publications, established for the first time the humble scientific offprint as an object of bibliophilic pursuit. The catalogue contains in nuce everything for which Dibner and Horblit are commonly acclaimed. Unlike the staid Kofoid, Evans was an inspiring and flamboyant presence—a bookseller manqué. He clearly captivated the young Jahn in his student days at Berkeley in the late 1950’s, tempting him with dealers’ catalogues and even passing on books from his library.1 Jahn’s simple and elegant sans-serif book-label—Ex Libris/ Melvin Edward Jahn—is obviously inspired by Evans’s more elaborate bookplate. Here alone does Jahn use his full name (as never in scientific publications), echoing his mentor’s resonant triplet. Jahn was a graduate student of paleontology under Charles L. Camp (1893-1975). His M.A. thesis (1963) was devoted to the fossil tigers and other carnivores of the La Brea tar-pits, a subject on which Camp had published years earlier. Camp was another of the great Berkeley book-collectors, with an enthusiasm for the complementary subjects of Western Americana and geology. He is best known for his revisions (1937 and 1953) of Henry Raup Wagner’s bibliography of The Plains and the Rockies (1920-21), still known in its fourth, posthumous edition (1982) simply as “Wagner- Camp.” Professor Camp, too, supplied Jahn with books from his library. 1 On July 3, 1961, Evans inscribed a copy of his Men and moments in the history of science (Seattle 1959) to Jahn with these encouraging words: “To Melvin Edward Jahn with hearty congratulations on his determination to collect treatises which have enlarged man’s knowledge and man’s horizon.” Coincidentally, July 3 was also the very day that Sothey’s of London auctioned off the scientific library of the Earl of Bute. And Jahn would later purchase six “treatises” from that sale. 4 The Jahn Collection of Early Geoscience Stimulated by such “ardent fellow enthusiasts” (as Evans once phrased his relationship to Jahn), it is little wonder that the disciple’s publications were overwhelmingly bibliographical. At the age of 25, in collaboration with the Latinist Daniel J. Woolf, Jahn published his only book in the history of science, The Lying Stones of Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer (University of California Press, 1963). This study of the most famous hoax in the history of paleontology took the form of an extensively annotated translation of Beringer’s rare Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (1726), reproducing the engravings in which the gullible Würzburg professor published hundreds of wildly improbable forged fossils. In his “Acknowledgments,” Jahn paid tribute to the endeavors of half a dozen booksellers from whom he had obtained 17th and 18th century texts [still in the collection]. His usual sources for antiquarian books included the firms of Bernard Quaritch Ltd., Wheldon and Wesley, and Zeitlin & Ver Brugge. Jahn appropriately dedicated his book (in Latin) to Charles L. Camp. Jahn’s extensive notes in The Lying Stones form a bibliographical history of the study of fossils, albeit in somewhat disconnected form. A glance at a list of Jahn’s own library reveals the extent to which this masterly survey of Beringer’s sources was based on careful examination of his own shelves, demonstrating yet again that there is rarely a substitute for the intimate familiarity bred by actual possession. Jahn’s superb library of 208 titles (in 242 volumes) contains a remarkably comprehensive collection of the monuments of early paleontology (1600-1800): the local inventories of petrifactions, the illustrated museum catalogues that record many a fossil for the first time, the magnificent illustrated folios on corals and shells, the English county histories in which fossils mingle with arrowheads and urns, the travel books, the learned correspondence, the diluvian theology, and the earliest truly scientific monographs. Reflecting the state of paleontology in the 17th and 18th centuries, many of the works encompass other scientific fields, including geography, comparative anatomy, zoology, mineralogy, and gemology. Apart from The Lying Stones, Jahn published twelve articles, all but one in The Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, between 1963 and 1975—studies of such notable early paleontologists as John Woodward, Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, and Edward Lhwyd. These too are bibliographical studies, based on Jahn’s own collections, which were essentially complete