# Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica > Isaac Newton - 1687 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/isaac-newton/newton-principia-mathematica-1687-strasbourg/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-05 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Isaac Newton - **Date:** 1687 - **Medium:** Letterpress printing on laid paper, in Latin, with woodcut diagrams in the text and one folding engraved plate - **Dimensions:** Quarto, approximately 238 x 178 mm as issued (edition format; this copy has not been physically measured for this record) - **Object type:** Printed book - **Period:** English scientific revolution, seventeenth century - **Current location:** Bibliotheque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg (BNU), held in deposit within the library service of the Universite de Strasbourg - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A copy of the first edition (1687) of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, held today by the Bibliotheque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg under shelfmark H 111.605. The edition itself has one of the best-documented back-stories in the history of science: written in an eighteen-month burst after a single visit from the astronomer Edmond Halley, nearly wrecked by a priority dispute with Robert Hooke that Newton met by threatening to suppress its most important book, and published only because Halley paid the printing costs himself after the Royal Society's own funds had been sunk into an unsold book about fish.What this record cannot do, and says so plainly, is complete the story of this particular physical copy. The Strasbourg library's own catalogue gives a shelfmark, a subject classification and a digitisation date of 2006, and nothing about who owned the book before it arrived there, or when. It may descend from the old Strasbourg Academie library that survived the fire of 1870, or it may have been bought fresh by the German university library founded the following year; the library's own record does not say, and this one does not guess on its behalf.The lead image is a genuine photograph of this copy's own title page, taken from the library's own digitisation. Everything else illustrated here -- a royal presentation copy, a record-priced Continental copy, portraits of Newton and Halley -- is clearly marked as being about the edition or its history in general, not about this specific book. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1687** An unidentified purchaser from the Royal Society's 1687 print run `[documented]` (origin) Printed in London at the press of Joseph Streater for the Royal Society, financed personally by Edmond Halley after the Society's own publication funds were exhausted by the unsold stock of Willughby and Ray's De Historia Piscium (1686). Distributed either through Halley's consignment arrangement with London booksellers or, for a minority of copies, through the bookseller Samuel Smith for export to Continental Europe. This is documented as a fact about the edition into which this copy was printed; no specific first buyer for this individual copy is recorded in any source consulted. - **1687-2006** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, purchaser, or intermediate custodian is documented for this copy between its printing in 1687 and its appearance, already under its present shelfmark, in the digitised catalogue of the Universite de Strasbourg. The library's own old scientific collections derive from two distinct general sources -- holdings that survived the pre-1870 Strasbourg Academie library, spared the fire that destroyed the separate municipal library during the Prussian bombardment of 24 August 1870, and holdings purchased or donated after 1871 by the newly founded Kaiserliche Universitats- und Landesbibliothek zu Strassburg. Nothing in this copy's own record indicates which of those two routes applies to it, or whether it arrived by some third route entirely, and this record does not guess. - **2006-present** Bibliotheque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg, held in deposit within the library service of the Universite de Strasbourg `[documented]` (digitisation and current holding) Held under shelfmark H 111.605, administratively part of the BNU collection but physically catalogued and digitised by the Universite de Strasbourg's own library service, which placed images of the book online on 2 June 2006 as part of the Numistral digital heritage library. The images used in this record are taken from that digitisation. ## Open questions - By what route, and in what year, did this specific copy enter the Strasbourg library's holdings? The item's own catalogue record gives a shelfmark and a digitisation date but no acquisition history. - Does this copy carry the common two-line 'apud plures Bibliopolas' title-page imprint, or the rarer three-line cancel title naming the bookseller Samuel Smith that is associated with export to Continental Europe? This has not been established without direct bibliographic examination of the physical volume. - Does the copy carry any owner's inscription, armorial bookplate, or manuscript annotation identifying an earlier private owner? None is recorded in the available digitised catalogue metadata. - Was this copy part of the pre-1870 Strasbourg Academie library that escaped the fire of 24 August 1870, or was it acquired afresh by the Kaiserliche Universitats- und Landesbibliothek founded in 1871? The general institutional history admits both possibilities and nothing in the item's own record settles which applies here. - Is the copy complete, including the folding engraved plate and the errata leaf that some first-edition copies now lack through loss or removal? This has not been confirmed from the material examined for this record. ## Sources - [1] The Royal Society, 'The fishy blunder that nearly prevented Newton's masterpiece from being published' (2012) - [2] Kronecker Wallis, 'How Newton's Principia Was Almost Never Published' (science books blog; a popular secondary account, flagged for replacement with Richard Westfall's Never at Rest and I.B. Cohen's Introduction to Newton's Principia) - [3] Halley's Log, 'Halley and the Principia' (2013), a day-by-day chronology of Halley's role in financing, editing and publishing the Principia - [4] Wikipedia, 'Hooke-Newton inverse square law controversy'. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with the published Newton-Hooke correspondence and Newton Project transcriptions. - [5] Chetham's Library, 'Newton's Principia', 101 Treasures of Chetham's - [6] Feingold, Mordechai, and Andrej Svorencik. 'A Preliminary Census of Copies of the First Edition of Newton's Principia (1687).' Annals of Science 77, no. 3 (2020): 253-348. - [7] MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, biography of Isaac Newton - [8] Numistral / Collections patrimoniales numerisees des bibliotheques de l'Universite de Strasbourg, catalogue record for Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (Newton, Isaac), shelfmark H 111.605, consulted via the site's own search interface - [9] Bibliotheque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg (BNU) digital collections homepage, for the general history of the university's old scientific holdings (pre-1870 Academie library versus post-1871 Kaiserliche Universitats- und Landesbibliothek acquisitions) and for the 1870 bombardment of the separate municipal library - [10] Wikimedia Commons, 'File:Newton - Principia (1687), title, p. 5, color.jpg', recording the original source URL of the Strasbourg library's own image server for this copy - [11] Wikimedia Commons, 'File:Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica 1687 (presentation copy to James II).jpg' - [12] Wikimedia Commons, 'File:Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, 1689 (brightened).jpg' - [13] Wikimedia Commons, 'File:Edmund Halley.jpg' - [14] Jeremy Norman, HistoryofInformation.com, 'Newton's Principia Mathematica and the History of its Original Publication', summarising A.N.L. Munby's 'The Two Title-Pages of the First Edition of Newton's Principia', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 10 (1952), and William B. Todd's bibliography of the first three editions in Koyre and Cohen's variorum Principia (1972) - [15] Cambridge Digital Library / Cambridge University Library, Newton Papers, on Newton's interleaved annotated copies of the Principia (Adv.b.39.1 and Adv.b.39.2) and the Wren Library, Trinity College, copy with Newton's autograph corrections - [16] University of Sydney Library, 'Annotated first edition copy of Newton's Principia', on the group of four corrector's copies sent out before the second edition - [17] Smithsonian Magazine, 'Most Expensive Science Book Sells for $3.7 Million' (2016), on the Christie's sale of a Continental-issue first-edition copy --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.