In This Issue

• Engineering Dean Donates the Millionth Copy of His Textbook to the Library
• Special Collections Showcases Its Euclid Collection
• New In the Davis Library!
• Local Historical Air Photos Now Available Online
• Springer eBooks
• Porter's Main Floor Takes Shape
• Welcome to Laura Howell, Martha Lauzon, and Kathy MacDonald
• Zotero

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Special Collections Showcases Its Euclid Collection

This summer Special Collections is showcasing items from its highly unique Euclid collection. The display, entitled Making Euclid Easier!, features examples of the many efforts made by editors and teachers to make Euclid more understandable to students and scholars.

Highlights include:

• UW's earliest edition of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, dated 1505
  
  
• A first translation of the Elements into a modern language (1543):
  
  
  This volume is noted by Susan Mavor, Head of Special Collections, as being especially remarkable for its intellectual importance, binding, grand stature, and “stand up” diagrams that are intended to help make Euclid’s concepts more comprehensible
  
  
• An early edition of Elements printed in France (1516)
  
  
• A miniature edition of Elements:
  
  
  
  
• An edition of Elements described by Ruari MacLean as “one of the oddest and most beautiful books of the entire century” for its use of colour to illustrate mathematical concepts (Pickering, 1847)

The collection as a whole is noted for its usefulness in showing the transmission and teaching of the Elements from its earliest printings to modern texts. It was recently described by a scholar visiting from Scotland as being “one of the world’s great Euclid collections.”

For more information on the display, contact:


Department Head, Special Collections
Ext. 33122

University of Waterloo Library
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
519 888 4883

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