Rare, obscure and historically significant works, each linked to every lawful online source known for it.
Unknown · c. 1404–1438
An illustrated codex written in an undeciphered script, filled with botanical, astronomical and balneological drawings. Still unread after six centuries.
Isaac Newton · 1687
Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation, the founding text of classical mechanics, in its original Latin edition.
Nicolaus Copernicus · 1543
The work that displaced the Earth from the centre of the cosmos, printed in Nuremberg in the year of its author's death.
Leonardo da Vinci · 1478–1519
Twelve volumes of Leonardo's notes and drawings on flight, hydraulics, weaponry, geometry and anatomy, assembled by Pompeo Leoni.
Francesco Colonna (attributed) · 1499
A dream-allegory printed by Aldus Manutius in an invented hybrid of Latin, Italian and Greek, celebrated as the most beautiful book of the Renaissance.
Columban monks · c. 800
An illuminated Insular gospel book of extraordinary intricacy, written on vellum and preserved in Dublin since the seventeenth century.
Hartmann Schedel · 1493
An illustrated world history from creation to the 1490s, containing over 1,800 woodcuts — the most heavily illustrated incunable printed.
Andreas Vesalius · 1543
The anatomical atlas built on direct dissection that overturned Galenic medicine, with plates from the workshop of Titian.
Commissioners of William I · 1086
A survey of landholding across England, the earliest surviving public record of the realm and the foundation of English administrative history.
Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī · c. 820
The treatise that gave algebra its name, setting out systematic methods for solving linear and quadratic equations.
William Shakespeare · 1623
The First Folio, which preserved eighteen plays that exist in no earlier printed source, including Macbeth and The Tempest.
Muhammad al-Idrisi · 1154
A world geography and atlas compiled for Roger II of Sicily, unmatched in accuracy in Europe for three hundred years.
Unknown Anglo-Saxon compiler (for “Bald”) · c. 900–950
One of the earliest surviving Old English medical texts: a two-book compilation of remedies, salves and surgical notes drawing on both Mediterranean and native Anglo-Saxon practice. Its “Bald's eyesalve” recipe was later found effective against MRSA in laboratory testing.