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An online project is aiming to build a database of all the books known to have been in Robert Hooke's personal library, with their current whereabouts. The website includes a searchable transcription of the Bibliotheca Hookiana (London, 1703), the auction catalogue prepared after his death, plus a list of other books that have been attributed to Hooke via his annotations but that are not listed in the auction catalogue.
The auction catalogue for Hooke's library is also reprinted in H.A. Feisenberger, Sale catalogues of libraries of eminent persons, volume II, Scientists (Mansell, 1975), and in Leona Rostenberg, The Library of Robert Hooke: the scientific book trade of Restoration England (Modoc Press, 1989).
Sir Geoffrey Keynes compiled the definitive account of Hooke's own published work, although it is "not without errors". (Purrington 2006)
Many of Hooke's publications have been digitized and are now freely available online, including:
On 20th March 1678, Hooke examined the scheme of bookseller and printer Moses Pitt for a universal atlas of the world, and commented, "His design for Atlas good". He took the scheme to Christopher Wren for an opinion, and then the proposal was read to the Royal Society on 28th March with Wren in the chair. A committee was appointed to supervise its preparation, including Hooke, Wren, Theodore Haak and Nehemiah Grew.
Hooke took a more active role than the other committee members, and eventually Pitt made a private arrangement with him to check the maps and text before printing in return for a fee of £200.
Hooke's "very full notes on the method and content of each regional description indicate that in his geographical concepts he was centuries before his time". The atlas was initially intended to be eleven volumes but rising costs contributed to Pitt's final bankruptcy and only four volumes were ever produced. "Apart from a few pounds on account," Hooke "never received any payment from Pitt for all the work he actually did."
Key sources for Hooke's life and work are his surviving diaries, covering the periods 1672-83, 1688-90 and 1692-93.
The manuscript of the diary for 1672-1683 is held by the London Metropolitan Archives of the City of London Corporation and has been digitized:
The diary of Robert Hooke, M.A., M.D., F.R.S., 1672-1680, a transcript edited by Henry William Robinson and Walter Adams (Taylor & Francis, 1935), is incomplete for its period of coverage. Felicity Henderson has supplied the missing entries in an article in the Royal Society's Notes and records:
R.T. Gunther covers the periods November 1688 to March 1690 and December 1692 to August 1693, but again the transcription is not entirely accurate.
The Diaries of Robert Hooke, by Richard Nichols (Book Guild, 1994), is not an edition, but an account of Hooke's life and work based on the diaries.
However, a new edition of the diaries is currently in preparation by Felicity Henderson.
After a long period of neglect, there has been an explosion in Hooke studies in recent years, as can be seen in this timeline. Some of the key general texts are available online, including:
See also the Biography.
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Page last amended 15th January 2025