15 Science Books That Print Like Design Objects: The Kronecker Wallis Catalog

The flagship of the catalog, and probably the work this publisher will be remembered for. The backstory is well known: in 1847, the Irish engineer Oliver Byrne printed the first six books of Euclid's Elements in a revolutionary visual language. He threw out the letter references in the proofs and replaced them with geometric shapes in red, yellow, blue, and black. The result was a publication far ahead of its time. But the Elements consists of thirteen books, and Byrne stopped at the sixth. The later books move into arithmetic and mixed subjects, which made the visual language increasingly difficult to apply.

This is exactly where Kronecker Wallis stepped in. With a team of mathematicians, university teachers, and postdoctoral researchers, they completed the remaining seven books in Byrne's language. What emerged is a publication that did not exist before and, given the sheer labor involved, is unlikely ever to be produced again: all thirteen books, in a single volume, in the Byrne aesthetic. The Elements is estimated to trail only the Bible in the number of editions printed since the invention of the press. This edition is one of the strangest and most handsome links in that long chain — and it is not the first time someone tried to make Euclid stand up off the page. Currently sold out, with a reprint expected in mid-2027. Mark your calendar.

The project that founded the publisher. Newton's 1687 masterwork consists of three books: The Motion of Bodies, The Movement of Bodies Through Resisting Mediums, and The System of the World. This edition stays faithful to that structure, binding the three books individually and housing them all inside a single main cover. Open them side by side, display them separately, or read straight through as one continuous text.

Every design decision is deliberate. The spine is left exposed, so the book opens wider and the stitching that usually stays hidden comes into view. The Greek letters alpha, beta, and gamma are dry-embossed on the covers. The text is Andrew Motte's first American translation, revised by N.W. Chittenden. Two colors, petrol blue and coral orange, run through the pages, colored backgrounds mark the opening of each section, and the index pages are printed on heavier paper so the book falls open right there. Of a limited run of roughly 1,000 copies, about 300 remain.

A facsimile of the small notebook young Newton used around 1664–1665. Every interior page of the original, preserved at the Cambridge University Library, is reproduced exactly as it is. The notebook holds Newton's reading notes on mathematics and geometry, and the most visible influences on its pages are John Wallis and René Descartes. That Wallis, the man who lent the publisher half its name, shows up in Newton's student notebook is a pleasant coincidence.

What makes it valuable is that the notebook does not stay a reading log. In its pages you watch Newton's own mathematical thinking take root: his study of infinite series, the development of the binomial theorem, the evolution of the differential calculus and its application to problems of quadratures and integration. In the notebook of a student in his early twenties sit the first sketches of ideas that would reorder the world within a few years — the same private, working kind of page you find three centuries later in Einstein's Zurich notebook, wrestling with a different set of equations. Currently sold out.

One of the most labor-intensive projects in the catalog. Carl Friedrich Gauss kept private notebooks throughout his career and filled them with discoveries he never published. Five of these manuscripts, preserved at the University of Göttingen, are gathered here in a single handmade volume. The production method is the genuinely wild part: every page has been vectorized by hand from the original scans. Every word, every symbol, every diagram, every correction has been redrawn with a digital pen. Not a single pixel from the original scans remains in the finished book. Gauss's handwriting is preserved, and the print clarity is flawless.

The table of contents reads like a course of study on its own. The legendary mathematical diary, the Mathematisches Tagebuch, contains the note the nineteen-year-old Gauss made on July 10, 1796, at the moment he proved that every positive integer is the sum of three triangular numbers: "ΕΥΡΗΚΑ! num = Δ + Δ + Δ". Alongside it sit his unpublished explorations of non-Euclidean geometry, written decades before Bolyai and Lobachevsky published theirs, the theory of curved surfaces connected to the Theorema Egregium, geodesic survey networks, and the Geometria situs, which carries early traces of topology. The large drawings were not shrunk to fit. They are included as foldable A4 inserts within the A5 format, possible only because the Japanese stab binding leaves the spine unglued. Each copy is hand-sewn and numbered — a private notebook treated with the same care Roger Penrose gave his own working journal, a century and a half later.

Somebody decided that a book about light should play with light, and then actually did it. In the 1704 Opticks, Newton proved through prism experiments that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors. The cover of this edition performs the same trick: a holographic film decomposes the light falling on it and reflects shifting colors depending on the viewing angle. Every time you pick up the book, Newton's experiment repeats itself on your desk.

The idea continues inside. The pages are printed with gradients that change color from chapter to chapter, and the transitions are visible from the outside along the cloth-lined spine. Even closed on a shelf, the book sits there like a spectrum. The text is complete: reflection, refraction, color phenomena in thin films, Newton's rings, and the famous queries on the nature of light. The starting point of modern color theory, in an object designed for physicists and designers alike.

The other side of the Opticks. In 1690 in Leiden, Christiaan Huygens published the Traité de la Lumière, proposing that light travels as a wave. Newton disagreed and defended his particle theory, and the dispute shaped optics for two centuries. Today we know Huygens was closer to the truth. It was the wave theory that explained diffraction and interference, and the double refraction in Iceland crystal was something Newton's particles could never account for.

The edition is set in facing pages in the tradition of the Loeb Classical Library: the 1690 French on the left, and on the right Silvanus P. Thompson's 1912 translation, the standard academic reference. A book whose subject is light gets to play with color: each of the five chapters has its own palette, the French and English texts are set in different tones within each chapter, and the colors drift as you turn the pages. The typeface is Spectral, evoking the seventeenth-century Dutch printing tradition. Each copy is hand-sewn with an exposed spine, numbered, and made to order.

The 1920 English edition of the book in which Einstein explained relativity to a general audience in his own words, printed in 2021 in a run of exactly 90 copies. Ninety. That number is not a typo, and it explains the sold-out status all by itself.

The most elegant detail is on the cover. The preface Einstein wrote for the book is set in a font digitized from his own handwriting. That font is no casual affair: it is a project Harald Geisler and Elizabeth Waterhouse completed over seven years with the support of the Albert Einstein Archive, funded by a Kickstarter campaign with 2,334 backers. Inside, the core ideas of special and general relativity unfold in Einstein's famously clear prose, built on thought experiments — the same handwriting whose trail from journal paper to letter eventually produced E = mc². For whoever manages to find one.

On June 25, 1903, Marie Skłodowska Curie defended her doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. The committee included names like Gabriel Lippmann and Henri Moissan, and the thesis was awarded the highest distinction. Five months later, Curie became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. This book is that very thesis: Recherches sur les substances radioactives. The document in which the term radioactivity was coined, the discoveries of polonium and radium were announced, and radioactivity was shown to be an atomic property rather than a chemical one. Its pages hold the data behind that famous labor: years of processing eight tons of pitchblende residue in an unventilated shed to isolate pure radium.

The design turns bilingualism into a physical joke. The French original starts from one side of the book; flip it over and the English translation, published in Chemical News in 1904, starts from the other. The two texts meet in the middle. Two languages, two front covers, one book. Curie won a second Nobel in chemistry in 1911 and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Her laboratory notebooks are still too radioactive to handle without protection.

Known at Bletchley Park simply as "The Prof's Book," this treatise is Turing's own analysis of the Enigma machine and the mathematical techniques used to break its encryption. It was written during the Second World War, remained classified for decades, and went down in history as the primary source on how the Allies cracked the code the German military believed unbreakable — a story The Imitation Game later dramatized for a much larger audience. Rotor configurations, plugboard settings, and the mathematical weaknesses Turing exploited, laid out systematically across these pages.

The restoration approach matches the rigor of the Gauss book. The typewritten text has been reset in a period-appropriate typeface for readability, but Turing's handwritten notes, margin comments, tables, and diagrams have been vectorized one by one and kept exactly where he placed them. Even the typing mistakes remain, with Turing's handwritten corrections above them. The original manuscript is held at the UK National Archives. This edition turns that document into a readable, collectible object.

On June 30, 1945, John von Neumann circulated a 107-page document that defined computer architecture for the next eighty years. The First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC described, for the first time, a computer that stores its program in the same memory as its data. The architecture inside your phone, your laptop, and every server the internet runs on came out of this report. Arithmetic unit, control unit, memory, input, output: the five-component diagram taught in every computer science curriculum lives here.

The edition turns a historical fact into design: the document was never formally published, only circulated internally. So it is printed like a classified technical report from the forties, on sky-blue paper in a monospace typewriter font, bound to a blue cardboard cover with four metal screw fasteners. The cover even carries the original U.S. Army contract number: W-670-ORD-4926. Together with the Turing treatise, these are two complementary documents from the same era and the same world. Turing proved what could be computed; von Neumann wrote down how to build the machine.

The documents that best explain Tesla's mind are his patents, and the United States Patent Office has 112 of them on record. This book collects all of them in chronological order, with the original technical illustrations and patent descriptions, across 500 pages. The publisher considered adding patents from other countries and decided against it: the source material was of lower quality and the content largely repeated the American filings. Choosing to prune a book rather than fatten it is a decision consistent with the character of this whole catalog.

The real draw is those old technical illustrations. Cut-away drawings, coils, motors, circuit diagrams: some of the most refined examples of nineteenth-century engineering draftsmanship, behind a black cover with enormous typography. One honest footnote: the copies currently on sale are the last 98 found in the warehouse, with millimetric printing flaws on the covers. The interiors are perfect, the cover flaws are the reason for the discount, and there is no reprint planned any time soon.

Tesla's most celebrated lecture. Delivered in 1892, it laid out his experiments and theories on high-frequency alternating current, ideas that would transform how electricity is transmitted while also planting the foundations of wireless communication. The detailed descriptions of the Tesla coil, the case for alternating current over direct current, and the logic of long-distance power transmission are all in this text.

Kronecker Wallis designed it as a companion to the patents book: the same clean aesthetic, an elegant 140-page volume in A5. Currently sold out, but knowing it was designed to stand next to the patents book on a shelf says something about the internal consistency of this catalog.

Launched on April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 was meant to be the third crewed mission to land on the Moon. When an oxygen tank exploded, the mission became a rescue operation, and the crew returned to Earth after 5 days, 22 hours, 54 minutes, and 41 seconds. One of the documents that made that return possible was this checklist, the step-by-step guide for activating the Lunar Module's systems. Power configuration, communications checks, life support: the crew's survival manual in the middle of a crisis — the same corridors and switches you can now retrace, safely, on a modern Street View walkthrough of a spacecraft mock-up.

Prepared for the mission's fiftieth anniversary, this facsimile is an 80-page A5 publication. The most striking detail is what has been layered over the original pages: Commander James Lovell's handwritten calculations for determining the spacecraft's angle of descent back to Earth, reproduced exactly where he wrote them. Those figures, put to paper roughly two hours after the explosion, may be the highest-stakes arithmetic in the history of engineering.

Alexander von Humboldt set out in 1799 to describe the world through the eyes of a modern scientist. On his five-year expedition through South America he covered more than 9,650 kilometers with Aimé Bonpland, published his findings in 34 volumes between 1807 and 1833, and in 1829, at the invitation of the Russian Tsar, made a second 15,000-kilometer journey across Siberia to the Chinese border. He backed his diaries and letters with a vast number of drawings, and he influenced the minds of an entire era, from Gauss to Goethe, from Thoreau to Bolívar.

This book gathers roughly 300 representative drawings into a visual travel companion, in the same spirit as Ernst Haeckel's plates of radiolarians and jellyfish. It is also the most tactile object in the catalog: different paper types, different textures, and different dimensions are bound into a single volume to set the sections apart. The aim is a kind of kinship between Humboldt touching the texture of a leaf in the rainforest and the reader feeling the material shift between the book's pages. The trilingual edition is currently sold out.

A 400-page book that tells the history of science through the faces of its protagonists. For centuries, the best painters of each era portrayed the best minds of each era, and those portraits are now scattered across museum walls and archive catalogs. This book collects them in chronological order: from Copernicus to Kepler, from Galileo to Newton, from Euler to Gauss, from Lavoisier to Mendeleev, six disciplines spanning the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

The list is not limited to the expected names. Pioneering women such as Ada Lovelace, Mary Somerville, Caroline Herschel, Laura Bassi, Maria Mitchell, and Émilie du Châtelet are a natural part of the book. Each portrait comes with context on both the scientist and the artistic medium: oil on canvas, tempera, engraving, studio photograph — a painted counterpart to what Alejandro Guijarro did with a camera and a physicist's blackboard. The 20-by-15-centimeter format fits the book on a coffee table and on a shelf alike. One of the densest objects you can put in a study.