📚 Optics

Light bent, split and focused: lenses, colour and interference, and the instruments that turn waves into microscopes and telescopes.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject optics in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Progress in optics	Emil Wolf	1963	62
	Zur Farbenlehre	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	1810	34
	Progress in Optics	Emil Wolf	1970	30
	Lehrbuch der Optik	Paul Drude	1900	26
	Mirrors, prisms and lenses	James P. C. Southall	1918	20
	Principles of optics	Max Born	1959	20
	Progress in Optics	Taco Visser	2016	20
	The principles and methods of geometrical optics	James P. C. Southall	1910	17
	Physical optics	Wood, Robert Williams	1905	13
	Mathematical theory of optics	Rudolf Karl Luneburg	1944	12
	Optics	Eugene Hecht	1974	11
	Introduction to optics	Frank L. Pedrotti	1987	9
	Prinzipien der physikalischen Optik	Ernst Mach	1925	8
	Geometrical and physical optics	R. S. Longhurst	1957	8
	Modern optical engineering	Warren J. Smith	1966	8
	Ophthalmic dispensing	Russell L. Stimson	1951	7
	Applied nonlinear optics [by] Frits Zernike and John E. Midwinter	Frits Zernike	1973	7
	Lasers and holography	Winston E. Kock	1969	6
	System for ophthalmic dispensing	Clifford W. Brooks	1979	6
	Electron optics	O. Klemperer	1939	5
	Introduction to classical and modern optics	Jurgen R. Meyer-Arendt	1972	5
	Practical aspects of ophthalmic optics	Margaret Dowaliby	1972	5
	Clinical optics	Troy E. Fannin	1987	5
	Optics of the human eye	David Atchison	2000	5
	Fundamentals of optics	Francis A. Jenkins	1950	4
	Optics	M. H. Freeman	1990	4
	Optics	Arnold Sommerfeld	1954	3
	All about telescopes	Brown, Sam	1967	3
	Worked problems in optics	Alan H. Tunnacliffe	1979	3
	Electromagnetic principles of integrated optics	Donald L. Lee	1986	3

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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