Byrne’s Euclid – A reproduction of the celebrated work from 1847

Tufte reproduced one diagram and the accompanying text as an example in one of his books. It might have been &quot;Envisioning Information&quot; but I&#x27;m not sure.<p>If I remember correctly he had lots of praise for the visualization and said that appart from the font it had a very contemporary look despite being from the 19th century. Tufte also showed a variant that added colored labels, but I don&#x27;t remeber if he recommended it. Another thing I remeber is a sidenote about how complicated it was to get the colors right in print.<p>EDIT: I was wondering if Tufte&#x27;s book was the inspiration for this but couldn&#x27;t find a reference at first. The making-of blog post mentions Tufte&#x27;s work:<p>&gt; Byrne’s work was largely ignored and criticized at the time of publication but it has gained renewed interest in recent years in part due to a mention from Edward Tufte in Envisioning Information and a reproduction by Taschen.<p>[..] &gt; Inspiration<p>&gt; I can’t recall when I first learned of Byrne’s edition but it was likely from Tufte or seeing Taschen in passing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c82.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?id=79" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c82.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?id=79</a>

There is also a version in ConTeXt (arguably a bit higher quality and with some very impressive programmatic typography): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jemmybutton&#x2F;byrne-euclid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jemmybutton&#x2F;byrne-euclid</a>

I have an edition of this published by Taschen [1] and spent some time going through it (about 3&#x2F;4 of the way through).<p>My main frustration is there are many mistakes. In an effort to keep the text aligned with the original, those mistakes are in-line and the corrections are at the beginning of the book in a prefix. This makes following the proofs a bit difficult since once you get far enough along the mistakes compound. The later proofs are built on earlier proofs. There are some instances where Proof C has a mistake that relies on Proof B that has a mistake, etc. And then flipping back to the corrections and keeping track of all of them is a bit difficult.<p>It&#x27;s not a problem if you are just enjoying the book for its aesthetics but since I was very carefully checking my understanding of the proofs it was annoying.<p>I still recommend the book.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Byrne-Six-Books-Euclid-Multilingual&#x2F;dp&#x2F;3836559382&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Byrne-Six-Books-Euclid-Multilingual&#x2F;d...</a>

Interesting that the book uses the old-fashioned &quot;long s&quot; (that somewhat looks like an &quot;f&quot;) despite being from 1847. The &quot;long s&quot; was already falling out of favor by the late 1700s.