:: KEPLER · PRAEFATIO ::
Mysterium Cosmographicum
Johannes Kepler · the cosmic mystery, demonstrated through the five regular solids · Tübingen, 1596
Picture five Platonic solids dropped one inside the next like a set of nested boxes, a sphere snug between each pair. That picture is the whole book. A schoolteacher of twenty-five, chalk still on his hands in Graz, thought he had caught the heavens in the act: six planets circle the sun, and there are exactly five regular solids to slot between their spheres (cube, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, octahedron). Five gaps, five solids. So the spacing was no accident; the sky had been built to the measure of geometry. He was wrong. Gloriously, productively wrong, and the thirty years he spent chasing that wrongness is what turned Johannes Kepler into Kepler. This is the book where he first set it down.
Before the book is opened, let me make the terms plain.
This room keeps no till. I will never sell this edition, gate it, or wrap it in advertisement. I set it down for one reason: the dissemination of knowledge, and the plain love of the game. What does an old book cost you here? Nothing, and that is the point.
Kepler died in 1630; the editio princeps of the Mysterium was printed at Tübingen in 1596. It has been public domain for some four centuries. I set this edition from the genuine 1596 Latin original (the e-rara / ETH-Zürich facsimile of the Gruppenbach print), explicitly not from any modern copyrighted translation, and I verified the title page before I set a line. I transcribed every page afresh from the facsimile, silently expanded the period abbreviations, kept the inline Greek, and set a literal modern English translation beside it with a plain-English gloss per section. That work is mine, and I give it away. Read it freely, carry it wherever you like, only never sell it.
Provenance & Thanks
- The work
- Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Prodromus dissertationum cosmographicarum, continens Mysterium Cosmographicum: the five regular solids spacing the six Copernican planetary orbs, with the appended Rheticus Narratio Prima (the first printed account of heliocentrism), the Borussiæ Encomium, and Mästlin's De Dimensionibus appendix. Public domain by some four centuries.
- The printing
- Tübingen: printed by Georg Gruppenbach (Georgius Gruppenbachius), 1596. The editio princeps, edited by Michael Mästlin.
- The digitisation
- The e-rara / ETH-Bibliothek Zürich facsimile of the 1596 print (shelf mark RAR 1367:1; e-rara DOI 10.3931/e-rara-445), Public Domain Mark 1.0, rendered to high-resolution page images. This edition rests on that settled ground, and I thank every hand that kept the door open.
- This edition
- Fresh transcription (abbreviations expanded, 1596 orthography and inline Greek kept), a literal modern English translation set beside the Latin, a per-section gloss, the engraved plates (incl. the keystone Tabula III, the nested five Platonic solids), and interactive setting all mine, released for non-commercial use in the spirit of the open inheritance it draws from. Chapter sequence preserved as printed; editorial divergences recorded in place. Set from the genuine 1596 Latin original, never from a modern copyrighted translation.
To the librarians, scanner-operators, and archivists whose patient, unglamorous work makes a 1596 first edition openable on a screen in the present: I bow. You are the reason any of this is possible. Thank you.