The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite

London: John Murray, 1885. 3rd Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. 3rd Edition. Hardcover. 4to - over 9¾ - 12" tall. 4to (224 x 162 mm). xvi, 213 [1] pp., including half-title, Woodburytype frontispiece, 46 text illustrations, and 24 mounted Woodburytypes and one chromolithograph. Pages uncut and largely unopened. Original Publishers silver-pictorial cloth with depiction of lunar craters on front cover (soiling of boards, spine ends repaired). Text with light browning and occasional minor spotting and dust-soiling, the plates with some foxing in margins. Provenance: J. Norman Lockyer*, ink stamps to frontispice verso and title-page, presented by the publisher John Murray (ink stamp "with Mr. Murray's compliments" to title-page; Nature publishing house (ink stamp to title-page "Nature / Bedford Street / 8 Nov 1885"). Interesting association copy. ----

The Photobook, p.51; Ashworth, The face of the moon, Linda Hall, 20 (for 1st ed.). - THIRD EDITION. Compared to the previous editions considerably smaller in size. "Photographers sometimes adopted realism over naturalism in order to render motifs more literally. On occasion, however, the reverse was true: photographers attempted to deceive through extremely literal treatment. The artist Les Levine once claimed iconoclastically that the folksaying "the camera never lies" is a lie. Nasmyth and Carpenter's The Moon presents an elaborately devised model photographed with the clarity of a subject at an arm's distance. The deception was necessary because successful astronomical photographs of sharp definition and good contrast were not possible until the twentieth century with the advent of sensitive films and efficient lenses. The Woodburytypes proved to be exceptionally effective illustrations and, doubtless, many readers were misled to think that they were seeing the face of the moon itself." (Truthful Lens, p. 38). This work is also notable for its original publisher's decorated cloth binding; it is reproduced in The Truthful Lens as fig. 6.
*Joseph Norman Lockyer was born in Rugby in Warwickshire on 17 May 1836. "A clerk in the UK government's War Office by day, Lockyer was a keen and talented young amateur astronomer by night - he was later to discover the element helium in the corona of the Sun by using a spectroscope. He shared a train carriage to London each day with John Ludlow and David Masson, both friends of Alexander Macmillan, and they asked him to be the science editor of their proposed new weekly, The Reader, which was to cover the arts, literature and science. The Reader was in many ways an early forerunner to Nature - thirty-eight people who supplied reviews to The Reader all later contributed to Nature... It's not clear who proposed the title "Nature", but a letter in July 1869 from Huxley to Lockyer reveals that Macmillan made the final decision. (source: Springer Nature website). - Visit our website for additional images and information.