by Corey S. Powell
Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius
($25),
Robert Hooke's Micrographia
($30), and
Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica
($75), from the Octavo Editions CD-ROM series. Octavo Corporation, 1998. Octavo Corporation
"What was observed by us in the third place is the nature or matter of the Milky Way itself . . . for the Galaxy is nothing else than a congeries of innumerable stars distributed in clusters."
Galileo penned these words in 1610 in Sidereus Nuncius. The book's yellowed pages and impressionistic sketches transport the modern reader to the exhilarating moment when a few simple observations stripped away age-old illusions of our place in the universe. Until recently this thrill was reserved to a handful of academics. Now it is available to anyone with a decent personal computer.
A young publishing house called Octavo has freed Sidereus Nuncius and a dozen other rare books from their temperature-controlled sanctums and ...
