Logarithmorum Chilias Prima is the first table of base-10 logarithms, written by Henry Briggs and published in 1617. I've previously taken a look at the accuracy of the table entries.
I thought it would be neat to have a faithful copy of the original printed version. To this end, the handwritten tutorial pages and tables of differences were removed to pare down to what must have been originally printed: the title page and the 15 pages of main-table entries.
The page images were scanned from EEB microfilm, scaled up, binarized, and the bitmaps hand-edited to remove miscellaneous blots and other noise, though the edits were strictly limited to cosmetic issues: areas near the digits were unchanged. There is also what looks like a hand-drawn line between mantissa and characteristic in each column. It seems unlikely this was printed—as a vertical rule it is packed impossibly close to the figures—so it must have been drawn in later. (An examination of the three extant copies [1] [2] might clarify this.) These lines were removed as well, though it required hand-editing of all digits intersecting the lines.
Here are PDFs of the page images and booklet impositions onto letter-size and A4-size pages, suitable for double-sided printing:
Logarithmorum-Chilias-Prima.pdf
Logarithmorum-Chilias-Prima-booklet-letter.pdf
Logarithmorum-Chilias-Prima-booklet-A4.pdf
Here's what it looks like printed on cream-colored paper with a pamphlet-stitched binding:
| [1] | Raymond Clare Archibald. The first published table of logarithms to the base ten. Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation, 9(50):62–63, 1955. https://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/1955-09-050/S0025-5718-1955-0069082-4/S0025-5718-1955-0069082-4.pdf |
| [2] | Denis Roegel. A reconstruction of Briggs' Logarithmorum chilias prima (1617). https://locomat.loria.fr/briggs1617/briggs1617doc.pdf |