The Dr. Elliott & Eileen Hinkes Collection of Rare Books in the History of Scientific Discovery. Ed. Earle Havens. Baltimore, Md.: The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, 2011. vii, 105, [1] p. $35 (ISBN 9780983808602)

Although the book is written by academic librarians and is dedicated to the efforts made by an urban academic library, its usefulness applies to all types of libraries wanting to create or build on diversity programming and outreach efforts .—Marcy Simons, University of Notre Dame. This beautifully designed and illustrated publication is a fitting tribute to Dr. Elliott Hinkes, an alumnus of Johns Hopkins University, whose wife and son in 2010 donated to the university's Sheridan Libraries his small but carefully chosen collection of rare books pertaining to scientific discovery. A discerning connoisseur who sought the best available copies of books and journal articles in his fields of interest, Dr. Hinkes developed a collection of more than 250 titles dating from the late 1400s to 1953. He chose copies notable for their distinctive bindings, associations, or provenance. The Hinkes Collection focuses on astronomy and physics, but it also includes important works dealing with biology , chemistry, meteorology, and optics, among other subjects. Here one finds truly seminal texts that advanced man's knowledge of the world and its place in the universe. Although most of the collection dates from the time of the Industrial Revolution to the mid-twentieth century, a few important books published during the Renaissance connect the reader with some of the best " scientific " minds of Greek and Roman antiquity. Included are Hartmann Schedel's Liber Chroni-carum (Book of Chronicles), published in Nuremberg in 1493; the third edition, in Latin, of Aristotle's views on cosmology, De Caelo; and works by Aristarchus of Samos, Archimedes, Euclid, and Ptolemy. The works of Renaissance scholars include the 1566 Henricpetri Basle edition, with pages never cut, trimmed, or bound, of Nicolaus Copernicus's De Revolutioni-bus Orbium Coelestium, perhaps the most important item in the Hinkes Collection. The writings of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei document their key astronomical observations, but none as colorfully as Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr's Atlas Coelestis, published in Nuremberg in 1742. More modern works in the collection range from four titles by Isaac Newton to offprints of scientific papers by Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein. The discovery of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick is described in three articles published in Nature. Although the book contains a bibliography of the Hinkes Collection, its value lies chiefly in the erudite essays that place the collection in the context of the evolution of scientific thought and …