Books and Manuscripts

Bacon, Francis
Operum Moralium et Civilium...
London: Edward Griffin, and Richard Whitaker, 1638. First edition, second issue (with Novum Organum). Thick 4to. (xiv), 386, (16), 475, (9), 360, 36, (2) pp. (many pages misnumbered); without separate title for Novum Organum, as usual. Illustrated with an engraved frontispiece portrait of Bacon. Full contemporary brown calf, stamped in blind and in gilt, front and rear joints and extremities worn; edges stained red; scattered light soiling to text. Gibson 197

Scarce second issue of the first collected works of Francis Bacon in Latin. This issue notably includes at the end the unsold sheets of the 1620 first edition of Bacon's great work on the scientific method, Novum Organum (see Gibson 103b). Part of his larger incomplete magnum opus, Instauratio Magna, Bacon sought “for the reorganization of scientific method and gave purposeful thought to the relation of science to public and social life,” and insisted on “making science experimental and factual rather than speculative and philosophical.” (Printing and the Mind of Man, p. 72)