Euclid, Elements
Thomas L. Heath, Sir Thomas Little Heath, Ed.

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I. Latin translations prior to 1533.

1482. In this year appeared the first printed edition of Euclid, which was also the first printed mathematical book of any importance. This was printed at Venice by Erhard Ratdolt and contained Campanus' translation¹. Ratdolt belonged to a family of artists at Augsburg, where he was born about 1443. Having learnt the trade of printing at home, he went in 1475 to Venice, and founded there a famous printing house which he managed for II years, after which he returned to Augsburg and continued to print important books until 1516. He is said to have died in 1528. Kästner² gives a short description of this first edition of Euclid and quotes the dedication to Prince Mocenigo of Venice which occupies the page opposite to the first page of text. The book has a margin of 2 1/2 inches, and in this margin are placed the figures of the propositions. Ratdolt says in his dedication that at that time, although books by ancient and modern authors were printed every day in Venice, little or nothing mathematical had appeared: a fact which he puts down to the difficulty involved by the figures, which no one had up to that time succeeded in printing. He adds that after much labour he had discovered a method by which figures could be produced as easily as letters³. Experts are in doubt as to the nature of Ratdolt's discovery. Was it a method of making figures up out of separate parts of figures, straight or curved lines, put together as letters are put together to make words? In a life of Joh. Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf, a contemporary of Kästner's own, this member of the great house of Breitkopf is credited with this particular discovery. Experts in that same house expressed the opinion that Ratdolt's figures were woodcuts, while the letters denoting points in the figures were like the other letters in the text; yet it was with carved wooden blocks that printing began. If Ratdolt was the first to print geometrical figures, it was not long before an emulator arose; for in the very same year Mattheus Cordonis of Windischgrätz employed woodcut mathematical figures in printing Oresme's De latitudinibus⁴. How eagerly the opportunity of spreading geometrical knowledge was seized upon is proved by the number of editions which followed in the next few years. Even the year 1482 saw two forms of the book, though they only differ in the first sheet. Another edition came out in 1486 (Ulmae, apud Io. Regerum) and another in 1491 (Vincentiae per