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"Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!" The Birth of a Classic.
New in stock this week is a superb first edition of one of the most popular scientific memoirs of the 20th century, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!. It was this volume of humorous short stories, depicting Feynman as an outsider and prankster, that cemented his popularity. But it's a book that almost wasn't written, and the story of its publication is as fascinating as the ones within its covers.
View full article →One Hundred Photographs from Life: R. B. Lodge & Early Wildlife Photography
Just in time for spring, we've listed these two charming books of early wildlife photography, one by the pioneering bird photographer R. B. Lodge, who took the first photo of a wild bird, a lapwing on its nest, in 1895.
View full article →Los Alamos to Princeton: Top Secret Manhattan Project Lectures
This book is rather unassuming - it bears the ownership signature of a Princeton student and looks like it could be any mid-century educational text in an inexpensive brown binder. But in fact, this is a rare and highly classified set of lectures printed for high-level employees of Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. How it came to be in the possession of a Princeton student a year before its contents were declassified is a fascinating story.
View full article →What's an Alembic? Alchemy, the History of Science, & Our Logo
One of the most exciting parts of starting a business is choosing your name, and as a science specialist I wanted one that would be evocative of the history of science, as well as broader concepts of discovery and knowledge. For a long time I’ve been interested in alchemy and its evolving place in the history of science, so an alchemical symbol seemed apt. And what better than the apparatus at the centre of so much alchemical, medical, and scientific work - the alembic?
View full article →Original Photos of the Pacific Theatre during the Second World War, including Nagasaki
Our most recent acquisition is an evocative collection of photographs documenting life in the Pacific fleet at the end of the Second World War, including the ruins of Nagasaki less than two months after the detonation of the atomic bomb.
View full article →Fly Like a Bird: Carl Friederich Meerwein's Die Kunst zu Fliegen nach Art der Vögel
Our most recent acquisition is Die Kunst zu Fliegen nach Art der Vögel, a wonderful early book on mechanical flight by Carl Friederich Meerwein (1737-1810), architect and engineer to the Prince of Baden and an early aeronautical theorist and experimenter.
View full article →How to Start Collecting Rare Books
As a rare book seller I regularly meet people who love old books but aren't sure that book collecting is the right hobby for them. Popular culture creates the idea that it's for older, wealthy men who attend glitzy auctions and have beautiful libraries. But in reality, book collecting is a very accessible hobby, and you don’t need to become an overnight expert or spend vast sums to build a meaningful library. To get you started, this article provides guidance for those new to rare books, with links and suggestions for additional resources.
View full article →A Wheel Within a Wheel: Bicycles & Women's Rights
As specialist in science and technology I'm not interested in discoveries and inventions only for their own sake, but also for how they affect people's everyday lives, sometimes in unexpected ways. A wonderful example is the adoption of the bicycle by late-19th century women as both a practical tool and a symbol of freedom. In A Wheel Within A Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (1895), the American suffragist leader Frances Willard describes her attempts to master this new technology, as well her belief that the bicycle will transform women's lives and their fight for equal rights.
View full article →Bringing Some Culture to the Physicists: Nina Byers & Richard Feynman
This first edition of Richard Feynman's The Theory of Fundamental Processes is from the library of the pioneering female physicist Nina Byers (1930-2014), who made important contributions to particle physics and superconductivity and had a humorous personal connection with Feynman, earning her a mention in Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman.
View full article →What Does Sloth Taste Like? A Victorian Guide to Meats of the World
As a rare book seller you spend a lot of time working with books you already know pretty well, the famous or infamous works that have had an out-sized impact on history. But the most fun part of the job lies in the chance encounters - in finding the strange, unusual and near-forgotten volumes that can teach us about the past. Recently I found remarkable Victorian book on how animals were used for food around the world: The Animal Food Resources of Different Nations with Mention of Some of the Special Dainties of Various People Derived from the Animal Kingdom (1885), by Peter Lund Simmonds. In addition to providing detailed information and statistics on the usual domestic and game animals, the book contains passages on the preparation and flavour of a staggering number of exotic creatures.
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