\"Salesmen of the Milky Way\" Priscilla Fairfield Bok Hand Signed 3X5 Card COA for Sale

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\"Salesmen of the Milky Way\" Priscilla Fairfield Bok Hand Signed 3X5 Card COA For Sale

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\"Salesmen of the Milky Way\" Priscilla Fairfield Bok Hand Signed 3X5 Card COA:
$279.99

Up for sale\"Salesmen of the Milky Way\" Priscilla Fairfield Bok Hand Signed 3X5 Card COA.This item is certified authentic by ToddMueller Autographs and comes with their Certificate Fairfield Bok (April 14, 1896 – November 1975) was an American astronomer and the wife of Dutch-born astronomer Bart Bok, Director of Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia and later of Steward Observatory in Arizona, US. Their harmonious marriage accompanied the four decades of their close scientific collaboration, in which \"it is difficult and pointless to separate his achievements from hers\". They co-authored a number of academic papers on star clusters, stellar magnitudes, and the structure of the Milky Way galaxy. The Boks displayed great mutual enthusiasm for explaining astronomy to the public: described as \"salesmen of the Milky Way\" by The Boston Globe, their general interest book The Milky Way went through five editions and was said to be \"one of the most successful astronomical texts ever written\". Fairfield\'s family lived in Littleton, Massachusetts, where her father was a Unitarian minister. She worked to be able to afford the tuition fees at nearby Boston University. On weekends, she would bribe the watchman to allow her access to the University\'s solar telescope on the roof (a telescope later named in her honour). She published an article on sunspot observations in Popular Astronomy in 1916. Fairfield undertook her graduate studies with W. W. Campbell of Lick Observatory, and after graduating from UC Berkeley in 1921, was rejected from a job at the General Electric Company on declaring that she eventually wanted to be an astronomer. She rejected two West Coast offers in favour of Smith College Observatory in Massachusetts. There she began working on RR Lyrae variable stars on weekends with Harlow Shapley and Bertil Lindblad at the Harvard College Observatory. Fairfield was an assistant professor in astronomy when she attended the International Astronomical Union\'s (IAU) Third General Assembly in Leiden in the Netherlands in 1928. Her assigned reception committee astronomer was a young graduate student, Bart Bok, ten years her junior; he proposed to her at the end of the conference. They corresponded for the next year, as Fairfield did not wish to rush into marriage. Within fourteen months, Bok had broken off his thesis studies at Groningen with Piet van Rhijn and moved across the Atlantic to Harvard on the invitation of Shapley, its Director. They were married on September 9, 1929, within three days of Bok\'s arrival in the US, at her brother\'s house in New York state. Shapley was initially dubious of Bok, and protective of his protégée Priscilla. They remained at Harvard for the next twenty-five years. Bart Bok was steadily promoted through the academic ranks at Harvard. Priscilla continued her research and writing, but was unpaid, a situation supported by Shapley, whom Bart described as \"rather cheap when it came to hiring people\".[4] The Boks had two children, a son, John, in 1930 and a daughter, Joyce, in 1933. Priscilla was the at-home parent until their children finished high school, and published less research herself in this period, though the Boks\' public outreach often took place together. Their marriage began a close scientific collaboration that would span the next four decades, in which \"it is difficult and pointless to separate his achievements from hers\". They co-authored a number of academic papers on star clusters, stellar magnitudes, and the structure of the Milky Way. Their enthusiasm for explaining astronomy to the public led to them being well known: they were described as \"salesmen of the Milky Way\" by The Boston Globe in 1936. Their main work together was a definitive undergraduate textbook and popular science book, The Milky Way, described as \"one of the most successful astronomical texts ever written\", which had five editions following its initial publication in 1941, and was translated into many languages. The writing of this book, begun in 1937, was shared equally according to Bart: Priscilla and I were working on the writing of the book on the Milky Way, and she had a little room upstairs where she did all her writing. We lived in Lexington at the time. The cleaning woman would say to her, \"Upstairs you go, you\'ve gotta go to work, don\'t just sit here and talk to me.\" And she worked very hard at it, and in the beginning we had eight chapters in the book. We agreed that I would write four chapters and she would write four chapters, and that we loved each other dearly, no problems. Then, after we had gone through this for about five or six months and the writing was getting under way we said, \"Now, you take my chapters, I\'ll take yours, now we get a better homogeneous book.\" Well, Priscilla stood one day in front of the fireplace, saying, \"If you want to change things that way, my part can go in the fireplace right now.\" She didn\'t do it. But that was really the most critical time that we ever had in our married life, trying to meld these two times four chapters into eight chapters. But I think it worked out, and later on we did much better. We had fun about it. But I tell you, the writing of a joint book is not always easy, if you\'ve got strong feelings about it.