Principia for Sale
With Christmas approaching, you may be looking for gift ideas so I thought I would pass on this advertisement:
The book concerned is a First Edition of the Continental Issue of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, dated 1687.
For more details see here. The estimate is “only” €100,000, which seems to me a bit on the low side. A similar volume was listed by Christie’s in 2016 as $1,000,000 to $1,500,000 but in the end sold for $3.7 million. This one has had some repairs and is slightly browned with age, but has an interesting provenance. I’d be surprised if it didn’t fetch at least a million. We’ll find out in a week!
In the Dark 
November 18, 2025 at 10:15 am
I wonder what the page charges were back then.
November 18, 2025 at 10:33 am
Making books was very expensive in those days. The first Edition was only a few hundred copies, including the Continental issue.
November 18, 2025 at 10:40 am
It was expensive to make papers until quite recently as well. I am old enough (as you might be) to remember when papers were typed by clerical staff and then had to be typeset by the publishers. Yet the page charges were a lot less back then.
November 18, 2025 at 10:24 am
It’s not clearly written. I recommend Subramanya Chandrasekhar’s 1995 book “Newton’s Principia for the common reader” (although Chandrasekhar’s idea of the common reader is already a physicist). I bought this book when it came out and am amazed to find that 2nd hand copies now go for 300 pounds. Let’s see what Newton’s own does. It would be nice if it were autographed!
November 18, 2025 at 10:32 am
I thought I was good at Latin until I started to read the Principia…I found it largely impenetrable.
November 18, 2025 at 2:33 pm
The Cambridge University Library opened its dedicated exhibition gallery in 1998 with a ‘greatest hits’ exhibition, but its sixth exhibition after that was all about Newton, and showed some stunning stuff.