A Star Called the Sun.

an uncommonly nice copy

First edition, first printing, and an unusually nice example of the dust jacket.

Physicist George Gamow (1904-1968) was the first to explain radioactivity as a quantum mechanical process, developed the first mathematical model of the atomic nucleus, and was an early proponent of Georges Lemaitre's Big Bang theory. He studied the physics of stars and wrote a number of popular science books, the second being The Birth and Death of the Sun, which presented cutting-edge astrophysics when it was published in 1940. By the 1960s so much new information was available that he revisited the topic in this book, A Star Called the Sun, significantly rewriting the original work but reusing some of his original illustrations and the stylish jacket art by Boris Artzybasheff.

First edition, first printing; 8vo; double-sided colour frontispiece, illustrations throughout the text, light spotting to the endpapers and edges of the text block; original blue cloth, titles to spine block in gilt, sun design to upper board in blind, pictorial endpapers, spine gilt a little dulled with a small scratch, an excellent copy in the lightly rubbed jacket with some fading of the spine panel; 208pp.