Collection: History of Science 2025

The BBC podcast All in The Mind recently introduced us to the idea of curiosity as an emotion. The theory is that it is an epistemic emotion, like awe or surprise, triggered by the gap between perception and understanding. It kick-starts the dopaminergic circuit in our brains – the network that stimulates us to look for a reward and makes us feel elated when we find it. We are prompted to take a quest to explain the mysterious.

We are clearly highly emotional at Sotheran’s, as we eagerly allow our natural curiosity to lead us down unexpected paths in search of the rare, the beautiful and the erudite. This catalogue is devoted to the curious minds of those ultimate seekers after knowledge - the experimenters and theorists who turned the notion of science as a dry pursuit on its head by following their epistemic emotions until they found a new way of explaining our world.

We include discoveries in all areas. From the first book to discuss electricity and the invention of relativity to a husband and wife’s survey of our deepest oceans, from the founding work of evolutionary theory to a crucial treatise on herbal medicine, we represent a huge range of scientific endeavour and enlightenment. Our dopaminergic circuits are lit up like Edison’s first lightbulbs, and we invite you to join us on this deeply emotional journey.