Reference collections

The catalog

Catalog of printed books and scientific journals:
https://catalogue.obspm.fr

The special and rare books collection

The special and rare books collection has over 3 000 works that were published before 1850, among which:

• 40 incunabula. The oldest (1476) is the first book in the world in which the date was printed on the title page and not as a colophon.
• 400 works from the 16th century, and notably by Apianus, Copernicus, Alessandro Piccolomini, Giovanni Paolo Gallucci, Tycho Brahe...
• 800 works from the 17th century, including original first editions of works by Galileo, Kepler, Hevelius, Newton…
• 900 works from the 18th century, among which are the works of the great geodetic astronomers such as Pierre Bouguer, Charles Marie de La Condamine, Pierre Louis de Maupertuis, Nicolas Louis de La Caille…
• The Library also has nearly 8000 books from the 19th century on astronomy, astrophysics and other disciplines such as meteorology and physics.

Moreover, the collections include many older journals, some of which go back to the 17th century, such as the Journal des savants (1665), the Philosophical Transactions (1665), the journals of the academies of Paris (1666), of Berlin (1700), of Uppsala (1710), of Leipzig (1682), of Saint Petersburg (1724)…

The modern collections

• 40 000 monographs
• 3 000 theses, including all the French theses in astronomy-astrophysics on microfilm
• 5 200 journals
• 306 journals received every year on paper.

The online documentation is one of the strong feature of the Library.

The printed journals

Current subscriptions available at the Library: <abonnements|courants>

Online journals Search by title