Special Collections
Book of the Month, July 2005
Johannes Widmann, the probable author of this book, was born in Eger in approximately 1460 and studied in Leipzig in the 1480s before becoming a lecturer at there, possibly the first person to teach algebra at the University. He became famous for his Behende vnd hunsche Rechnung auf allen kauffmanschafft (1489), the first significant German book on commercial arithmetic, and the first book to use the modern plus and minus signs. Algoritmus linealis – or, in some editions, Algorithmus linealis – is another landmark, being the first printed treatise on calculation with the aid of counters.
The text was first printed in Leipzig by Martin Landsberg, in three editions estimated at dating between 1490 and 1495. The edition at Senate House Library was printed by Melchior Lotter, who flourished between 1495 and 1538. An important printer of Luther’s works, his other output included printed early humanistic works, editions of the classics intended as textbooks and Catholic writings. The date in the colophon of Algoritmus linealis is 1490, but the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (ISTC) dates it as being from approximately 1505.
This modest, 12-page work, written in black letter and boasting woodcut illustrations of abacuses, is very rare. The ISTC records just one copy, in the British Library (with a different title page, “Algorithmus”). There are no electronic records on RLIN or on the German union catalogue, Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (KVK). In his Arithmetical Books from the Invention of Printing to the Present Time (1847), Augustus De Morgan listed the edition as being “among books of the fifteenth century which I have had no opportunity of seeing”. He must have been delighted to have been able to purchase a copy in July, 1848. It is one of the many valuable and rare early mathematical texts in his library, one of the founding collections of Senate House Library. The book was catalogued electronically earlier this year, as part of a current project to catalogue the De Morgan library.
specialcollections@shl.lon.ac.uk 
020 7862 8470 shl.specialcollections@london.ac.uk 020 7862 8470
