ELEMENTI DI CHIMICA TEORICA, E PRATICA

Venice: Giovanni Gatti, 1781. 214 x 147 mm. (8 1/2 x 5 3/4"). Four volumes..
Attractive contemporary limp paper boards, patterned with yellow, red, and black inks, paper manuscript labels on spines, deckle edges. With four folding engraved plates at the end of volume IV. Pastedown of volume I with a small square of paper with some inscrutable pencil notations glued down. Bolton, p. 646; Cole 893; Partington III, pp. 80-90. ◆Edges just a touch bumped, a few pages with some very light foxing, one page with a small hole affecting a word or two of text, plates a little browned along the fold and one plate partially torn along the fold, but still A SUPERB COPY, exceptionally fresh and clean inside and out.

Offered here in very pleasing contemporary paper boards, this is the first combined edition in Italian of two of Macquer's most popular works: "Élémens de chymie-théorique" (1749) and "Élémens de chymie-pratique" (1751). Coherently written in a straightforward manner, primarily with the classroom in mind (Macquer himself was a highly respected teacher), these works became instantly successful as university-level textbooks. Partington tells us that they replaced Lemery's rather outdated "Cours de Chymie" as the favored text for teaching, and they were eventually translated into English, German, Russian, and Italian. Macquer (1718-84) made a few modest chemical discoveries, but his chief contributions to the science were his applications of chemistry (in particular to the porcelain industry) and, most importantly, his writing. In addition to the present work, he also penned "the first dictionary of chemistry in the modern sense," according to Partington. Given that Macquer's works were often destined for the hands of students, our copy is a fortunate survival indeed, not to mention enormously charming with its original deckle edges, clean contents, and vibrant pattern. This edition also appears to be quite rare. OCLC locates only 10 copies worldwide with just one in the US (Huntington) and one in the UK (Wellcome)..