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Dover at 75: A Brief History of Dover Mathematics and Science
An Editorial by John Grafton
February 2016 |
We are celebrating the 75th anniversary of Dover Publications in 2016, but looking back it appears that the science and math program is a mere 71 years old this year. The first math title we printed ourselves, Eugene Jahnke and Fritz Emde's Tables of Functions With Formulae and Curves (it was a translation of a German book, Funktionentafeln mit Formeln und Kurven), came out in 1945. We offered this 382-page book at that time for the somewhat curious price of $1.90, less than a penny a page for a lot of information. We no longer offer Jahnke and Emde, it has been superseded by Internet sources and is long out of print, but it had a long life.
To mark this 75th anniversary for customers of our math and science books, we selected 75 (75 for the 75th) of the best books we've ever published in this program. Not all are bestsellers, though some certainly are, but they are almost all books which have been around for a while and stood the test of time, and meant something to our program.
Morris Kline's Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach reminds us that Prof. Kline was the editorial founder of the Dover math program. During the 1950s and into the 1970s, Prof. Kline, while he was a Professor at NYU's Courant Institute, met on a weekly basis with Dover's founder Hayward Cirker to evaluate publishing ideas and to review books offered to Dover for republication. He reviewed hundreds of books every year, and the applications—oriented point of view which at least sometimes has dominated our outlook owes its influence at Dover to Prof. Kline. Later, and for more than 20 years, Dover's main math reviewer was Richard A. Silverman, prolific translator of Russian mathematical and scientific books, and the author of our Essential Calculus with Applications, also on our list for the 75th.
Also involved almost at the beginning was the prolific guru of generations of recreational mathematicians, Martin Gardner, who reviewed books for us regularly for decades and also allowed us to reprint many of his own books, including, on our list for the 75th, My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles. Anyone who enjoys logic puzzles should be sure to also have a copy of Raymond Smullyan's The Gödelian Puzzle Book, on our list of 75 but only one of several books by Prof. Smullyan which have revitalized Dover's recreational math list in recent years. I'm glad to point out that many of the books on this math list have been widely used as course texts for many years and have stood up to the competition during that time very well — Stanley J. Farlow's Partial Differential Equations for Scientists and Engineers, Bert Mendelson's Introduction to Topology, Morris Tenenbaum and Harry Pollard's Ordinary Differential Equations, Charles C. Pinter's A Book of Abstract Algebra, among many others.
For a book which has stood the test of time, few can match Dirk J. Struik's A Concise History of Mathematics which Dover first published in 1948 and revised several times through the 4th edition in 1987 which, this being Dover, is certainly still in print. I corresponded with Dr. Struik quite a bit over the years about this book and other books, but we never had a chance to meet until a Joint Math Meeting in Baltimore several years ago. He was there, limited to a wheelchair at that time but as interested in math books as ever. He had been born in Holland in 1894 and was over 100 years old when we met. He lived to be 106, no doubt the oldest Dover author ever.
The book which put our physics program on the map was of course Einstein's The Principle of Relativity, first published in English in 1923 and, after it went out of print, reprinted by Dover in 1952. It's difficult to imagine a book of that stature ever going out of print today. Einstein was dubious about reprinting it. He asked Mr. Cirker who would be interested in his "old" book? He took some persuading, but ultimately we were able to go ahead with it, and it's been in print with us ever since. We have gone from there to having a physics list which includes many other Nobel Prize Winners — Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Max Born, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Melvin Schwartz, just to name a few.
Albert Einstein was not the only reluctant author on the Dover list. In the late 1940s, Mr. Cirker approached former President Herbert Hoover about reprinting the translation of the 16th century engineering classic, De Re Metallica, which Hoover had published, in collaboration with his wife, early in the 20th century. Before he went into politics Hoover had been a very successful mining engineer, and had completed many complex engineering projects around the world. He and Mrs. Hoover had both studied Latin and they had published an outstanding translation of De Re Metallica in a limited edition in 1912. Mr. Cirker wanted to make this classic of scientific literature widely available for the first time. President Hoover cautioned him against it and told Mr. Cirker that he would hate to see a bright young man just starting out in business lose a lot of money on this esoteric project. Mr. Cirker persisted, and Hoover finally relented. Dover has had De Re Metallica in print ever since.
Reprinting important out of print books has always been a focus of our program, and will continue to be. However, readers of this newsletter will also find something new in this installment, an announcement of the first books just published in our new Aurora Series of original books in mathematics. We're continuing of course to reprint fine out of print books, but we've decided also to start publishing some new mathematics titles of our own. Selecting manuscripts with the advice of our Aurora Advisory Board, we plan to develop a varied list with books for the general reader, the college student, and the professional mathematician. The next several Aurora titles are in the works, and we'll be bringing you news of them as they appear. Thanks to all for your support. We're looking forward to getting Dover's second 75 years off to a great start.
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John Grafton
Senior Editor |
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