Jupp v.d. Sanden. Der Gleitflugzeugbau. Karl Lange Verlag, Duisberg, 1935.  21xc15cm, 39pp, 52 illustrated plates.  Stiff wrappers. Very Good condition. WorldCat/OCLC locates only 5 copies of this work. $95   This is a DIY for glider construction, with everything from fashioning your workplace to cutting the wing struts from large pieces of lumber to hardware selection. It seems to me as though everything you need to do the job is here. 

This book is actually two-in-one, the whole opening first to a bi-fold, the left half opening as text and the right containing the illustrations.  The first opening reveals the book to be 21x30cm,, and when the book is fully opened it becomes about 21x520cm. It is an attractive design, though I think it is more problematic to work with the book printed in this manner. 

Here’s the work opened:

Friedrich W. Sertürner, (1783-1841).  “Über das Morphium, eine neue salzfähige Grundlage, und die Mekonsäure, als Hauptbestandteile des Opiums“, in Annalen der Physik, I/25, pp 56-90, 1817.  Offered in an individual issue of the Annalen, in the original wrappers, removed from a bound volume, 120, plus one plate.  Very Good condition. $500

“Rational drug discovery from plants started at the beginning of the 19th century, when the German apothecary assistant Friedrich Sertürner succeeded in isolating the analgesic and sleep-inducing agent from opium which he named morphium (morphine) after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus. He published a comprehensive paper on its isolation, crystallization, crystal structure, and pharmacological properties, which he studied first in stray dogs and then in self-experiments…This triggered the examination of other medicinal herbs, and during the following decades of the 19th century, many bioactive natural products, primarily alkaloids (e.g., quinine, caffeine, nicotine, codeine, atropine, colchicine, cocaine, capsaicin) could be isolated from their natural sources”–Atanas G.Atanasova, et alia, “Discovery and resupply of pharmacologically active plant-derived natural products: A review”, Biotechnology Advances, Volume 33, Issue 8, December 2015, Pages 1582-1614.

“(Serturner’s) determination now of the alkaline nature of morphine marks an important step in the beginnings of alkaloid chemistry. Its isolation is the first isolation of an alkali with a vegetable origin”–Claire Parkinson, Breakthroughs, p. 264. 

Also in this volume: Chladni, “Ueber die sprungweise gehende Bewegung mancher Feuerkugeln, nebst einigen Folgerungen”, pp 91-102  

 “Euery Cloud engenders not a Storme.”–Shakespeare, Henry VI, Pt. 3 (1623) v. iii. 10

 “Vapour, previously unseen, makes its appearance as cloud, or mist, or fog.”–T. H. Huxley Physiogr. (ed. 2) 40  

“But Howard gives us with his clearer mind
The gain of lessons new to all mankind;
That which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp,
He first has gain’d, first held with mental grasp.
Defin’d the doubtful, fix’d its limit-line,
And named it fitly.—Be the honour thine!
As clouds ascend, are folded, scatter, fall,
Let the world think of thee who taught it all.”–Goethe, “Howards Ehrengedächtnis”, 1821

HOWARD, Lucas. “Ueber die Modification der Wolken”, in Annalen der Physik, I/21, 10th Stuck, 1805, pp 137-159, with the original wrappers, removed from a larger bound volume. Very Good condition.  $500

The great cloud pioneer Luke Howard (1772-1864) first published on his cloud classifications in his papers “On the Modifications of Clouds and on the Principles of their Production Suspension and Destruction being the Substance of an Essay read before the Askesian¹ Society in the Session 1802-3″ in 1803, launching him from general normal obscurity into the ranks of the internationally known. He had done what Aristotle and many others down the years hadn’t–classified (his “Modifications” of the title of his 11k-word effort) the moving mountains in the sky, making him a Linnaeus/Godfather of clouds, his nomenclature quickly adopted worldwide. 

Howard, a pharmacist/chemist/meteorologist² invoked a Latin nomenclature for his classification, which was a very smart idea, as Latin was already Latin (as it were) and didn’t need to face the difficulties and obstructions of being translated into other languages, as was the case with the problematic Lamarckian system introduced just a year earlier which was phrased out in French and which encountered many problems in translation. Howard’s universal nomenclature and his creative and poetic descriptions following deep study and endless sketches³ created a static environment from what was seen as an impossibly dynamic flow of changes in the structure of clouds.

According to the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (the entry written by Richard Hambyn, the only person to write a book on Howard’s naming of clouds), “…he proposed that every cloud belonged to one of three principal families, to which he had given the Latin names: cirrus (meaning “fiber” or “hair”), cumulus (“heap” or “pile”), and stratus (“layer” or “sheet”). In recognition of the essential instability of clouds, Howard also introduced a sequence of intermediate and compound modifications, such as cirrostratus and stratocumulus, in order to accommodate the regular transitions occurring between the cloud types…”

Notes:

1.  “Askesian”, meaning “philosophical exercise”, was “…a practically oriented and largely non-conformist group dedicated to natural and experimental philosophy”.  http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/

2.  According to the OED, “meteorology” goes back quite a way as a word, popping up in 1563; “meteoroloician” appears in 1580, and “meteorologist” in 1683.)

3.  “The location of many of the sketches gives us an initial hint of their Romanticism. For many years Howard traveled between London and the Lake District in order to capture the full range of what he termed ‘cloud modifications’, training himself in the notoriously difficult art of depicting clouds, of fixing them as they changed  “