The Signet Library 200th Anniversary Online Exhibition

signet library collection guides

the napier collection

John Napier of Merchiston (1550-1617), the inventor of logarithms and transformer of the means by which complex arithmetical calculations were made, was Scotland’s greatest mathematician and a man to bracket alongside Lord Kelvin, Joseph Lister and Alexander Fleming. In 1914, the tercentenary of his invention was marked by an international conference of scholars in Edinburgh and the publication of a string of finely-produced commemorative works that retain their value a century later. This was in spite of the loss of almost every significant Napier manuscript in a tragic fire in 1801.

The Napier Collection contains rare early editions of each of Napier’s five works - one theological, four mathematical in nature. Also present are translations into European languages. The works are: A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1594); the Descriptio (A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithms) of 1614; Rabdologiae (Rabdology, or calculation with rods)of 1617; the Constructio (The Construction of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms)of 1619; and De Arte Logistica (this last not published until the Maitland Club edition of 1839). The Plaine Discovery perhaps presents the greatest interpretative difficulties for the modern reader as it is not only concerned with what is notoriously the most opaque of the New Testament books but it draws on a tradition of interpretation that is almost entirely alien to modern thought.

Part of the collection was gathered by Macvey Napier WS during his golden librarianship of 1805-1837, but a large proportion is drawn from another great Napier collection, that of William Rae Macdonald (1843-1923), the actuary and antiquarian and translator of Napier (Macdonald’s 1889 translation of the Constructio into English is present in the Collection).