THE COMPLEAT SURVEYOR: OR, THE WHOLE ART OF SURVEYING OF LAND, BY A NEW INSTRUMENT LATELY INVENTED;.

The Compleat Surveyor: Or, The Whole Art Of Surveying Of Land, By A New Instrument Lately Invented;.

Bound in recent half calf over marbled boards period style, gilt, old library stamp on the margin of title page and again on verso, unobtrusive blind stamps on the plates and another stamp on the last leaf, otherwise a fine crisp copy, with all the plates and text in very clean condition.

£750.00

Details

UNRECORDED ISSUE

Publisher

Printed for S. Ballard, at the Blue-Ball, in Little-Britain, London.,

Date

1744

Synopsis

As also by the plain table, circumferentor, the theodolite as now improv'd, or by the chain only. containing plain and easy directions in several kinds of mensurations, and other things necessary to be known in a work of this nature. by william leybourn. the whole altered and amended, and two entire books added by the author long before his death. the fifth edition, in ix books. every operation both geometrical & arithmetical being examin'd, and an appendix added to the whole, consisting of practical observations in land surveying, by samuel cunn.

Item Description

5th edition, Folio. 7.25 x 11.25 inches. [xii] + 100 + 166 + 155 pp. + [1] pp. advert, illustrated with portrait frontispiece and 13 folding plates. Each of the three sequences (Books 1-3, Books 4-6 and Books 7-10) has separate registers and paginations, numerous head and tailpiece vignettes and decorated initials.

Notes

We have been unable to locate another example of this 1744 reissue of the 1722 fifth edition, to which it is otherwise identical (including the advertisements at the end). The new title page differs in omitting the red lettering and having the 1744 imprint of S. Ballard, replacing that of Samuel Ballard and his two associates. It was no doubt an attempt by Ballard's descendants to sell the unbound sheets of the 1722 edition. We have been unable to trace another copy with this inprint and date. This is surprising as Leybourn's works had a high reputation and remained in print into the nineteenth century. The earliest version of this work appeared in 1650, being enlarged and issued again in 1653, and expanded in three further editions published during the author's lifetime, to 1679. Samuel Cunn, 'Teacher of Mathematicks', added the Appendix on practical land surveying, for the revised fifth edition of 1722.
Cunn, who became a quantity and land surveyor, designed a new instrument, a sector, corrected the first English edition of Newton's Arithmetica universalis and published editions of Euclid in addition to his own mathematical works.
William Leybourn (1626-1716), an experienced surveyor was appointed one of the surveyors to assess the damage caused by the Great Fire of London in 1666; he also worked as quantity surveyor in the city and published on the subjects of astronomy and mathematics.
The Compleat Surveyor describes the instruments of surveying and how to use them, including his new Perambulator, and includes a pleasing section on the preparation of colours 'to adorn and beautify' estate maps. The work is particularly notable for the extensive use it makes of logarithms and trigonometry, with its tables of logs, sines and tangents. The later books at the end examine measuring, the construction of dials and the legal aspects of surveying. A fine copy, with numerous attractive vignettes, of an influential work in the history of land surveying, in a hitherto unrecorded issue.

[Stock No. 20932]