(2) American Astronomy Books From the 1800s by Burritt and Olmstead. 

Size: (largest) 9 1/4 X 6 X 1 in. 

These two astronomy books were written by Elijah Burritt and Denison Olmsted. The Burritt book is titled The Geography of the Heavens, And Class Book Of Astronomy; Accompanied  By A Celestial Atlas, and it’s the fifth edition, published in New York in 1841 by F. J. Huntington. The Olmsted book is titled An Introduction to Astronomy; Designed As a Textbook for the Students of Yale College, and it’s the Stereotype  Edition that was published in New York in 1849 by Collins & Brother. The Burritt book has a leather spine with horizontal gilt rules and gilt lettering, green paper boards, blank endpapers with the owner’s name inscribed on the front flyleaf (Lucinda [    ], Auburn Female Seminary), the title page, the copyright page is dated 1833 - that is the date of the first edition - then a Publisher’s Notice, a three-page Preface, a one-page Index, a seventeen-page Introduction (viii - xxiv), the text runs to page 305, followed by 27 pages of Tables about the constellations and ascension and declinations of the stars etc., and it is not accompanied by the Celestial Atlas; that was a separate book reserved for the early editions. The Olmsted book is leather bound, with a black label and gilt lettering on the spine, blank endpapers with the owner’s name inscribed in early pen (probably a quill pen), the frontis shows a telescopic view of the moon, then the title page, the copyright page is dated 1839, which was the year the first edition was published, then a two-page Preface, an eleven-page Analysis (this is the Index, from v - xv), the text is 300 pages long, followed by sixteen pages of Outlines of a Course of Lectures on Astronomy Addressed to the Senior Class in Yale College in 1849, a two-page list of Recommendations of Coffin’s Conic Sections that Olmsted will use in his next lectures, two pages of plates showing the Great Comet of 1843 and Nebula and Double Stars at the rear, and the back cover shows other book titles published by Huntington. Elijah Burritt (1794 - 1838) was an American astronomer and mathematician born in New Britain, Connecticut, he was a blacksmith, then studied at Williams College and moved to Georgia, but felt uncomfortable because he was considered a “Yankee” in the deep South, so he moved back to Connecticut and turned his parent’s home into an observatory. Then he organized a group of settlers who moved to Texas to join the newly formed Republic of Texas, where he died after contracting Yellow Fever. This book is his seminal work, first published in 1833, and it is considered to be the groundbreaking American astronomy book of the period. Much of the nomenclature he developed, especially regarding the visible stars and constellations of the Southern hemisphere, is still in use today. The first edition was accompanied by an atlas of eight charts depicting the heavens by season and hemisphere - seven of the charts were hand-colored - and the Stereotype Edition was not accompanied by the atlas, which has value all on its own. The Burritt books measures 6 5/8 x 4 1/4 inches wide and is in pretty good condition for its age. It has a sturdy binding and clean pages and text for the most part, with occasional browning, there are vertical cracks on the spine and loss at the crown, rubbing along the edges of the spine and at the tips, two tips are slightly turned in, and there is white tape along the edge of the title page, probably because the page had become loose and was made secure by the tape. The Olmsted book measures 9 1/4 x 6 inches wide and is in good condition for its age. It has a tight binding and no missing or loose pages, with occasional browning or foxing, some offset from the engravings, light wear on the edges of the spine and light scrapes on the leather. Denison Olmsted (1791 - 1859) was an American physicist and astronomer from East Hartford, Connecticut who graduated from Yale and taught at Yale and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he is credited with giving birth to meteor science after observing the Leonid meteor shower over North America in 1833 - he was just fascinated by the phenomenon and even collected data from the public about what they saw - one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing. A gold rush in North Carolina got the state legislature to sponsor the first state geological survey ever attempted in the U.S. and Olmsted traveled throughout the state on horseback to collect minerals and fossils, and his findings were published in a geological map in 1825. In 1835 he and his associate Elias Loomis were the first American investigators to observe Haley’s Comet, and Olmsted is noted for his textbooks on natural philosophy and astronomy. (Natural philosophy studies nature and the physical universe.) Early editions of the Burritt book go for about $200 to $1200, and that’s without the accompanying Celestial Atlas, and the atlas itself goes for about $2300 on the rare book website we use, and the Olmsted book goes for $25 to $200, depending on the edition. The two books are important sources of study about stars and the heavens above, and they shed light on how the celestial universe was viewed in the early 1800’s.