The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid

Oliver BYRNE (1810-1880). The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid. London: [printed by Charles Whittingham for] William Pickering, 1847. Small 4to. (9 x 7 ¼ inches; 230 x 183mm). Pp.[i-]viii-xxix[-xxx]; [1-]2-268. Numerous criblé initials,  most text in black, but the text interspersed with a plethora of colour-printed elements: figures and symbolic elements, occasional penciled corrections to the text. (Title and two following leaves loosely inserted, light old  horizontal folds to the title and the following leaf, the title narrower than the book-block, the first and last leaves with strengthening to the inner blank margins, lower outer corner of pp.xiii/xiv torn away without loss to text, small chip to blank outer margin of pp. 117/118 & 267/268, three-inch clean tear from upper margin into text area of pp.235/236, some other small faults, some brittleness to the outer margins, old dampstaining). Contemporary cloth-backed marbled boards (scuffed, rubbed, chipped and soiled, joints split, inner hinges strengthened).

Provenance: The Mercantile Library Company, Philadelphia (blind-stamps to covers, library label on rear free endpaper, small oval library stamp to 60 pages); Prof. Allen C. Pipkin (1931-1994, of the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island); by descent.

“First edition of "one of the oddest and most beautiful books of the whole century" (McLean).

Byrne's "most innovative educational work was a version of the first six books of Euclid's Elements that used coloured graphic explanations of each geometric principle" (wikipedia).

Friedman describes the naissance of the work: it ocurred to Byrne that "it might be easier to learn geometry if colours were substituted for the letters usually used to designate the angles and lines of geometric figures. Instead of referring to, say, 'angle ABC', Byrne's text substituted a blue or yellow or red section equivalent to similarly coloured sections in the theorem's main diagram". 

The book, a technical masterpiece, was also praised for its artistic merits when it was exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Unfortuantely, the technical difficulties encountered in the production of the book meant that it ended up being far too expensive for the average teacher who might wanted to adopt Byrne's new way of teaching geometry and the book was not a commercial success.  But, the "book has become the subject of renewed interest in recent years for its innovative graphic conception and its style which prefigures the modernist experiments of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. Information design writer Edward Tufte refers to the book in his work on graphic design and McLean in his Victorian book design of 1963. In 2010 Taschen republished the work in a facsimile edition and in 2017 a project was launched to extend the work to the remaining works of Euclid." (wikipedia). 

Byrne, Irishman by birth, was self-educated and described himself as a mathematician, civil engineer, military engineer, and mechanical engineer. 

Friedman, Color Printing in England 43; Keynes, Pickering, pp. 37, 65; McLean, Victorian Book Design, p. 70. Susan M. Hawes & Sid Kolpas, "Oliver Byrne: The Matisse of Mathematics", Convergence (Mathematical Association of America), Aug. 2015.