He’s been collecting antiquarian books for about thirty years and has long preferred, as he calls them, “grubby” books that have been used by their readers, and second editions, which are “often more important” when you think of the book as “an instrument rather than as an object.” “I’ve never been so taken aback by anything in my life,” DiLaura recalled of his initial realization that he possessed one of those long-lost Newtons.

The books identified by de Villamil ultimately went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1943, but the ones the Musgrave family had sold earlier had been scattered, some ending up in Cardiff, and one, at least, in Colorado. While not a guarantee, “The presence of both the Musgrave and Huggins bookplates is generally accepted as proof that a book previously belonged to Isaac Newton,” according to the special collections and archives at Cardiff University in Wales, which found Newton-owned volumes in their collection the same way, one in 2012 and another in 2018. De Villamil uncovered 858 of Newton’s books and the chain of ownership from Newton to Huggins to Musgrave. That is until 1927, when a bibliophile named Richard de Villamil wrote an article titled “The Tragedy of Sir Isaac Newton’s Library” for The Bookman, which caught the attention of a Musgrave heir, who invited him to see what was left of the library. The books stayed in the Musgrave family for generations, and by the time a large portion was sold off in 1920, the Newton provenance had been forgotten, and the remainder were “stuck away in cupboards and corners,” according to one report. James Musgrave bought the library, adding shelf marks and slapping on a fresh bookplate. The warden of London’s Fleet Prison, John Huggins, purchased the books en bloc for his son, Charles, a rector in need of a “fussy library,” said DiLaura. When Newton died intestate in 1727, all of his possessions were sold, including about 1,896 books. He vaguely recalled the name and set off to do some bookplate research. Its placement all but obliterated a shadowy bookplate underneath, which, with the help of a “very strong light,” DiLaura came to discover belonged to Charles Huggins. The armorial bookplate placed smack in the center of the marbled front pastedown conveys the ownership of one James Musgrave. That’s when he noticed something new in his second edition (1717) of Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks: a bookplate obscured under another bookplate. “I took every book off the shelf and examined it carefully,” he said.

He had decided to compile a bibliography of his chosen field, the history of optics, which necessitated close inspection of 774 books. DiLaura, professor emeritus of civil and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, spent some of last year’s pandemic seclusion sorting through his collection.

Opticks by Isaac Newton