This may be of interest to some:

http://www.rarebookroom.org/

… which has decent-resolution page-by-page photos of a number of old books from various libraries around the world. Books like:

Copernicus, Nicolaus (author) – De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Libri VI – 1543 – Nuremberg – The Warnock Library

Galilei, Galileo (author) – Sidereus Nuncius – 1610 – Venice – Stanford Library

Kepler, Johannes (Author) – Astronomia Nova – 1609 – – The Warnock Library

Kepler, Johannes (Author) – Harmonices mvndi . . . – 1619 – Lincii Austria – Stanford Library

Newton, Isaac (author) – Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica – 1687 – London – Stanford Library

Sacro Bosco, Joannes de (author) – Sphaera mundi – 1490 – – Stanford Library

Darwin, Charles (author) and Wallace, Alfred (author) – On the Tendency of Species fo form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection – 1858 – London – The Warnock Library

Franklin, Benjamin (author) – Experiments and Observations on Electricity – 1751 – London – The Warnock Library

Maxwell, James Clerk (author) – A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field – 1864 – Oxford – The Warnock Library

Newton, Isaac (author) – Opticks – 1704 – London – The Warnock Library

And a bunch of others. What it doesn’t *seem* to have is any way to download the images… it’s all done via Flash, and if there’s a way to save the images as something useful like jpegs or PDFs (apart from the drudgery of doing a vast number of “print screens” and stitching the results together… bleah), I haven’t figured it out.

Still… first edition Galileos, Newtons, Keplers! Now, if I could find some first editions of Archimedes and Heron…