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red_admiral
Is (1939) the oldest date reference on HN so far?
ginko
Almost certainly not. Just today we had a (1940) submission[1] and I remember stuff from the 19th century at least.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438773

shmageggy
These are fairly easy to find using HN search (https://hn.algolia.com)

Here's one from 1584: Natural Magick (1584) 67 points by brudgers on Oct 8, 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21180895)

I'm sure you could easily go back further

madcaptenor
Back to 1300:

Adriaen Coenen’s Fish Book (1580) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10267645

That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die (1580): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26611980

The Geometric Landscapes of Lorenz Stoer (1567): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735432

Qvestions of Love, and the Ansvvers (1566): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836805

Concerning Prohibited Books (1563): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31139174

Magia Naturalis (1558): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736083

Bruegel the Elder’s “Big Fish Eat Little Fish” (1556): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30603305

De Re Metallica (1556): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8381659

The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (1542): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39247090

Carta Marina (1539): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369517, submitted multiple times

Tabulae anatomicae by Andreas Vesalius (1538): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29369517, submitted multiple times

Chapter III. Concerning Mixed Principalities (1532): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30450709 (an excerpt from Machiavelli)

The Very First Written Use of the F Word in English (1528): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7220683 (although the post it links to wasn't written in 1528)

Albrecht Dürer’s Pillow Studies (1493): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30496850

Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (circa 1490): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187316

Kitchen Appliances: Bedlam in da Vinci's kitchen (1490): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11890162

Leonardo da Vinci’s Handwritten Resume (1482): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7102356

Evrard D'Espinque’s Illuminations of De Proprietatibus Rerum (Ca. 1480) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33117656

The Virgin and Child, three heads in profile and other sketches (c. 1478-1480): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31054300

The Ideal City (1480-1484): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284222

Destroy the printing press (1473): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15921971

Behold the Nebulous Smear: al-Sūfī's Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars...

chadbr
Awesome - it would be great to have a printed version of this.
echoangle
The PDF image quality is much worse than the preview, i hope EPUB is better but for some reason the EPUB download is very slow (~50 KB/s)
zuminator
Really? I would say it's about the same quality as the preview. Did you download the full color PDF or the black and white PDF?
echoangle
Full color. Look at the sticker on the second page, the right edge and the letters make the difference very obvious. The PDF looks extremely compressed.
Lammy
Might indicate poor support for JPEG2000 in Archive's software? That's what you get when you click the download link for "Original" files. Sadly it's not easily readable that way but at least someone could use them to assemble a better PDF with some cropping, rotation, and white-balance: https://i.imgur.com/IdBujgi.png
the_arun
How much of analysis & details have gotten in to this book?

Humans have come a long way!!

__mharrison__
This is awesome. A ton of work went into this book.

My grandfather was an advertiser/illustrator during this time period. I wonder if he had this book in his basement library...