# Is "Sidereus Nuncius" by Galileo Galilei a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo Galilei (Tommaso Baglioni, Venice, 1610) is identified by: Quarto, Venice, 1610, under the imprint of Tommaso Baglioni; Linda Hall Library, following the census work on this book, records that the actual presswork was done by Niccolo Polo and Roberto Meietti and puts the edition at about 550 copies — roughly 30 on fine paper and roughly 520 on ordinary paper, with about 350 copies reaching the Frankfurt book fair that same year. Venice: Tommaso Baglioni, 1610 is the true first, and there is no UK-versus-US question: the original language is Latin and the Venice quarto is the only original.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- Quarto, Venice, 1610, under the imprint of Tommaso Baglioni
- Linda Hall Library, following the census work on this book, records that the actual presswork was done by Niccolo Polo and Roberto Meietti and puts the edition at about 550 copies — roughly 30 on fine paper and roughly 520 on ordinary paper, with about 350 copies reaching the Frankfurt book fair that same year
- The lunar images in the Venice sheets are etchings (copperplate), not woodcuts, and signature C, which carries the bulk of them, is made up of two half-sheets — evidence that the plates were printed separately from, and later than, the text
- The great internal point is the drop-title on B1 recto: Galileo first set the Jovian moons as 'Cosmica Sydera' for Cosimo II, and when the Grand Duke's preference arrived mid-printing the reading was corrected to 'Medicea Sydera' by a small printed cancel slip pasted over the heading
- Many Venice copies carry the slip and some do not; both belong to the first edition
- Fine-paper copies were presentation gifts and carry between two and seven corrections in Galileo's own hand
- Publisher imprint reads Tommaso Baglioni, Venice

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Galileo Galilei |
| Publisher | Tommaso Baglioni, Venice |
| Year | 1610 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | Quarto, Venice, 1610, under the imprint of Tommaso Baglioni |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
Quarto, Venice, 1610, under the imprint of Tommaso Baglioni; Linda Hall Library, following the census work on this book, records that the actual presswork was done by Niccolo Polo and Roberto Meietti and puts the edition at about 550 copies — roughly 30 on fine paper and roughly 520 on ordinary paper, with about 350 copies reaching the Frankfurt book fair that same year. The lunar images in the Venice sheets are etchings (copperplate), not woodcuts, and signature C, which carries the bulk of them, is made up of two half-sheets — evidence that the plates were printed separately from, and later than, the text. The great internal point is the drop-title on B1 recto: Galileo first set the Jovian moons as 'Cosmica Sydera' for Cosimo II, and when the Grand Duke's preference arrived mid-printing the reading was corrected to 'Medicea Sydera' by a small printed cancel slip pasted over the heading. Many Venice copies carry the slip and some do not; both belong to the first edition. Fine-paper copies were presentation gifts and carry between two and seven corrections in Galileo's own hand. Because two modern forgeries of this book have been exposed and unmasked in print, provenance and physical examination — not the title-page reading alone — are decisive here.

## Is this the true first?
Venice: Tommaso Baglioni, 1610 is the true first, and there is no UK-versus-US question: the original language is Latin and the Venice quarto is the only original. The trap is a second 1610 edition printed at Frankfurt by Zacharias Palthenius within months of the Venice sheets. It is distinguishable at a glance: a smaller octavo format, lunar and asterism images re-cut as woodcuts (rendered white-on-black rather than the Venice black-on-white), and it reproduces the uncorrected 'Cosmica Sydera' drop-title that the Venice copies correct by cancel slip. It has long been called a piracy, though Linda Hall Library notes recent evidence that Galileo knew of it and that it may reflect his manuscript intentions. Either way, a Frankfurt 1610 copy is a same-year reprint, not the first edition.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club apparatus applies to a 1610 quarto; the live tells are facsimiles and forgeries. The 1964 facsimile is the documented source of a giveaway in the De Caro forgeries: a plate reverse-engineered from a scan carried an inked blotch at the foot of the title that exists only in the facsimile's reproduction, where a brownish area had gone black. Nick Wilding's published tells for the forged copies include 'pepiodis' for 'periodis' on line 15 of the title, a backward-tilted V in VENETIIS, an ampersand whose top loop is closed up with ink, a P in 'Priuilegio' with a stray leftward stroke at the foot, and the letters p and i touching in a way letterpress cannot produce but a digital reproduction can. Both known forged copies passed through Marino Massimo De Caro.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Sidereus Nuncius* by Galileo Galilei a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/sidereus-nuncius
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.