"The Elements of Euclid" de Oliver Byrne

Ruari McLean, in his groundbreaking study Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing, calls Oliver Byrne's 1847 edition of The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid "one of the oddest and most beautiful books of the whole century." The century was the nineteenth; the publisher was the great William Pickering; the printer, his collaborator and close friend, Charles Whittingham—and McLean was right on the money: indeed it is. Byrne, who wrote a number of books on mathematics and engineering, served as "Surveyor of Her Majesty's Settlements in the Falkland Islands," which, in case you don't know, are in the middle of nowhere in the South Atlantic Ocean. Presumably he had a lot of time on his hands, for in this very beautiful volume, he devised a radical method, which he claims to have tested "by numerous experiments" and with considerable success, to teach the six basic propositions of Euclid. To do so, instead of mathematical symbols, he employs colors and shapes whereby "the Elements of Euclid can be acquired in less than one third the time usually employed, and retention of this memory is much more permanent."