Recent Acquisitions
Turner, E. L. | Broadland Birds
£250.00
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First and only edition of this beautifully illustrated work by pioneering bird photographer Emma Louise Turner (1867-1940), which includes the first publication of her award-winning photo of a Great Crested Grebe on its nest. This copy from the library of prominent bird photographer Eric J. Hosking (1909-1991), demonstrating the strong influence that Turner had on later generations in her field. In the introduction to their 1947 book, Masterpieces of Bird Photography, Hosking and co-author Harold Lowes lamented that they were unable to include her image of a water rail because no prints or negatives could be located.
This copy from the library of prominent bird photographer Eric J. Hosking (1909-1991), with his owl bookplate and a blank sheet of his stationery loosely inserted, as well as a Christmas card signed “Cyril, 1934”. This was likely from Cyril Newberry, a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society employed by the London Midlands & Scottish Railway Scientific Research Laboratory, and one of Hosking’s frequent co-authors.
Author E. L. Turner became interested in photography after meeting wildlife photographer Richard Kearton in 1900. She joined the Royal Photographic Society the following year, and by 1904 was giving talks illustrated with her own slides. Turner was particularly interested in birds and travelled throughout the UK and Europe to photograph them, but her main base was in the Norfolk Broads, where she lived for part of each year beginning as early as 1901. This was where, in 1911, she photographed a nestling bittern, proving that the species was breeding in Britain for the first time since 1886. Another highlight of her career was the award of the Royal Photographic Society’s Gold Medal for a photograph of a great crested grebe on its nest, published in Broadland Birds in 1924. In 1904 Turner was elected one of the first fifteen female members of the Linnean Society. In 1909 she became one of the first four honorary female members of the British Ornithologist’s Union, and she was the only woman involved in the 1933 appeal that led to the creation of the British Trust for Ornithology.
The owner of this copy, Eric Hosking, developed his loves for nature and photography at an early age and by 1937 he was first person in Britain to make their living solely in this field. Hosking was intrepid in his pursuit of wild birds. He designed his own hides and made a number of important technical advances, among them the use of the flash in nature photography. His most famous photo is the “technically perfect” shot of a barn owl carrying prey that he captured using an electronic flash in 1948 (Sage, “A Photographer in Hiding”, New Scientist, September 1979). He is widely credited with developing wildlife photography into a mature art form. Hosking was awarded the RSPB’s Gold Medal in 1974, and three years later received an OBE. -
London: Country Life, Ltd., 1924.
Quarto. Original green quarter cloth, green boards, titles to spine gilt and to upper board in white, marbled endpapers. Frontispiece and 25 double-sided plates from photos by the author. Spine very slightly toned, boards with mottled fading as usual for this book, spotting to the contents and edges of the text block.
Brazier, Mary A. B. | The Electrical Activity of the Nervous System
£150.00
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First edition, first impression. A beautiful copy and rare in such nice condition in the dust jacket.
Author Mary Brazier (1904-1995) was an internationally recognised neurophysiologist who also became a respected historian of science in later life. She was educated at Bedford College in London, and did important research on the nervous system, including electrical activity in thyroid disease, nerve injuries, “war neuroses”, and the effects of anaesthesia on the brain. Following the Second World War she worked with Norbert Weiner at MIT, where they developed an analog correlator to analyse EEG and other nerve potentials, then joined the Brain Research Institute at UCLA, where she continued pioneering the use of computers in neurology. “As editor of the important new journal in her field, she published an important bibliography of EEG publications ranging from 1875-1948... Her later work on the history of her field explored these early publications and extended back into the beginning of neurophysiology in the seventeenth century” (Ogilvie, pp. 174-175).
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...A Textbook for Students. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1951.
Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to spine and publisher’s roundel to upper board gilt. With the dust jacket. Diagrams, charts, and illustrations from photographs within the text. Ownership signature and ink stamp of Henry Guze on the front free endpaper. An excellent, fresh copy in the jacket that is very lightly rubbed with a few shallow scuffs affecting the upper panel.
de Muyttere, Charles | Porcelain card of a Belgian patissier
£50.00
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RESERVED The attractive and delicately printed “cartes porcelaine” of Charles de Muyttere, patissier. Printed using multi-colour metallic ink on a lead white ground, the card depicts him holding a three-tiered confection and pointing to his elaborately engraved name. Surrounding him are five other offerings, including an elaborate architectural construction and a fountain with two doves, what look like a pie and a dish of fruit but may have been complex sugar sculptures, and a five-tiered pastry under a glass dome.
“Most surviving trade cards produced by chromolithographers in the years leading up to the middle of the nineteenth century are Belgian. They belong to a broader category of lithographed product generally referred to in Belgium and France as ‘cartes porcelaine’ (enameled cards). Their common feature is that they were printed on card that had been coated with white lead (otherwise known as ceruse or carbonate of lead); the substance was similar to the lead paint used by artists and was often referred to in France as Clichy white. Card with this white lead coating was subject to pressure from steel cylinders at the final stage of manufacture, which gave it a sheen and also ensured a perfectly smooth printing surface. This provided lithographic printers with an opportunity to produce extremely intricate work, which they did by turning to the process of engraving on stone” (Twyman, A History of Chromolithography, p. 422, cited by the Princeton Graphic Arts Collection).
This card was printed by Eduard Daveluy of Bruges, whose own trade card is held in the collection of the Rijksmuseum.
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Bruges: Eduard Daveluy, c. 1840.
Chromolithographic trade card (92 x 56 mm). 4 small spots of paper adhered to the back from placement in an album. Excellent condition.
Feynman, Richard & Steven Weinberg | Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics
£100.00
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First edition, first impression. An attractive copy of this uncommon book on the quest to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics.
These two lectures were presented at Cambridge in 1986 in honour of Paul Dirac (1902-1984), one of the primary architects of quantum mechanics, who died in 1984. Authors Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg were two of the heavyweights of modern physics and were both strongly influenced by Dirac. Feynman (1918-1988) worked on the Manhattan project before winning the Nobel Prize for his theory of quantum electrodynamics, and became a pop culture figure after publishing his best-selling memoir, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman. Weinberg (1933-2021), who was widely considered the most important physicist of the late 20th century, received the Nobel for uniting the weak nuclear force with electromagnetism.
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...The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Octavo. Original red cloth, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. Portrait frontispiece of Paul Dirac by Richard Feynman. Cloth very lightly rubbed at the tips, two tiny areas with loss of size from the head of the spine, small production flaw in the gutter of the rear endpapers. An excellent, fresh copy in the jacket that is very lightly rubbed at the extremities with a few short closed tears and nicks and a Kroch’s & Brentano’s price ticket to the lower panel of the jacket.
Gunther, Robert Theodore [manuscript by Lionel James Picton] | Coelenterata: Hydrozoa, Acraspeda, Anthozoa, Ctenophora. Notes from the Lectures of Mr. R. Gunther of Magdalen...
£650.00
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RESERVED A remarkable and unusual anatomical manuscript on jellyfish based on laboratory work and lectures by Oxford zoologist Robert Theodore Gunther (1869-1940). The title, Coelenterata, is an antiquated term for species in the phyla Cnidaria (corals, sea anemones, true jellies) and Ctenophora (comb jellies). The student who compiled these notes would win the Welsh Prize for anatomical drawing in 1898 and go on to become a highly respected physician. While volumes of lecture notes in popular subjects such as zoology, anatomy, and botany are not uncommon, we have never come across one related to species such as jellyfish.
Gunther was the child of the zoologist Albert Charles Lewis Gotthilf Günther (1830–1914) and Roberta M’Intosh, herself “a gifted zoological painter” and he “absorbed his family's consummate involvement in medicine, natural history, and the museum”. After graduating with a first in morphology (now termed zoology) from oxford he spent two years studying marine and freshwater medusae at the Marine Zoological Research Laboratory in Naples.
Gunther was appointed lecturer in natural science at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1894, beginning this course in the same year. “As natural science tutor he had supervision of all Magdalen's science students, and from 1894 of the Daubeny Laboratory (which served a wider clientele within the university). He also lectured in comparative anatomy (biology) from 1900 to 1918, was librarian, 1920–23, published various works relating to Magdalen's history, and was a curator of the adjacent botanic garden, 1914–20” (ODNB).
The compiler of these notes, Lionel James Picton OBE (1874-1948) earned undergraduate degrees at Oxford in 1901 the year after he qualified in medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. After several years as house surgeon at institutions in London and Liverpool he settled in practice at Holmes Chapel, a village Cheshire. He served as a medical officer for the nearby urban district of Winsford and as surgeon to the town’s infirmary. Picton was a driving force for innovation in medical care and administration both regionally and nationally as a member of the British Medical Association. He was particularly interested in the connections between agriculture and nutrition, particularly “the treatment of soils and the nourishing of crops by suitable manures and the breeding of tubercule-immune cattle... and the preparation of wholemeal bread, raw greenstuffs, turnip juice, and other vegetable products” (obituary in the British Medical Journal, November 27, 1948) and in 1946 published a book on the subject, Thoughts on Feeding.
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...delivered in the Michaelmas term ‘94 & the Hilary term 1895: A : Di in the University Museum — supplemented by notes and sketches of laboratory work, & other additional matter from various sources. Merton College, Oxford. Oxford, 1894-95.
184-page manuscript (205 x 166 mm, text primarily on the rectos) bound in pale cloth, title “Coelenterata” in gilt to the spine and upper board. Extensive lecture notes and drawings in black ink with numerous elaborate illustrations, many coloured in with pencils. Cloth stained and darkened, hinges starting. Very good condition.
(Mathematics) | Georgian era arithmetic workbook
£350.00
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A substantial early-19th century arithmetic workbook with several calligraphic headings featuring animals in the designs, in coloured ink.
The contents of this workbook comprise lessons and exercises in advanced arithmetic, primarily multiplication, division, and the conversion of quantities. The contents are strongly mercantile in flavour, featuring problems such as “In 552 common pounds of silk how many great pounds”; “If I give 1£ 1s 8d for 3 lbs of coffee what must be given for 29 lbs & 1 oz”; and “What is the half years rent of 547 acres of land at 15s 6d per acre per anum”.
The manuscript also features occasional overwriting in a different hand, with some entries dated 1820. These seem to be records of sales of wood and articles fashioned from it.
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England, c. 1800-1820.
84-leaf purpose-made blank book (200 x 165 mm). Original tan half skiver, waste paper marbled boards. Manuscript equations, notes, and calligraphic illustrations in coloured ink filling all 168 pages. Overwriting in a separate hand, dated 1820, on some pages. Spine rolled, boards worn, occasional smudges and spots to contents. Very good condition.
Glenie, James | The Doctrine of Universal Comparison, or General Proportion [Bound together with] A Geometrical Investigation of Some Curious and Interesting Properties of the Circle
£450.00
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A mathematical sammelband containing the first editions of two scarce texts by the soldier and mathematician James Glenie (1750-1817). The second Glenie volume, A Geometrical Investigation of Some Curious and Interesting Properties of the Circle, is inscribed “From the Author”, and contains a long equation and seven small textual corrections in the same ink, but it is unclear if this is an authorial or secretarial hand.
During his education at St. Andrews Glenie showed aptitude for science and mathematics, but on the outbreak of the American War of Independence he enlisted and was sent to North America, becoming second lieutenant in the engineers in 1776.
“In 1774, while in the army, it seems that Glenie discovered the 'antecedental calculus', and wrote 'a small performance' of it in Latin which was printed in July 1776. He sent a paper on this to the Royal Society, which was read in 1777 and published the following year. At much the same time Glenie wrote papers entitled 'The division of right lines, surfaces and solids' and 'The general mathematical laws which regulate and extend proportion universally', printed in the society's Philosophical Transactions in 1776 and 1777. These publications, with his book, The History of Gunnery with a New Method of Deriving the Theory of Projectiles (1776), secured Glenie's election to the Royal Society on 18 March 1779, while he was still in Quebec... In 1794 Glenie published a new booklet on the antecedental calculus. Newton's approach to the calculus had used the notion of limit unclearly, and also drew upon velocity; Glenie wished to avoid all this, so as an alternative he defined the derivative of a function algebraically by using the binomial theorem in order to express the ratio of the increments of two functions as a power series in the incremental variable h, and then blithely deleting terms containing powers of h above the first. A related work was a letter from Glenie to Francis Maseres, containing 'A demonstration of Sir Isaac Newton's binomial theorem'. This, and other papers by Glenie, were published by Maseres in his Scriptores logarithmici (6 vols., 1791–1807).” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
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...[and] Smart, John & Charles Brand. Tables of Interest, Discount, Annuities, &c. First Published in the Year 1724 by John Smart, and now Revised, Enlarged, and Improved by Charles Brand. To Which is Added an Appendix, Containing Some Observations on the General Probability of Life. London: for G. G. J. and J. Robinson [and] T. Longman; T. Cadel; and N Conant, 1789, [1805] [&] 1780.
Quarto (265 x 205 mm). 19th century half calf, buff boards, marbled endpapers, edges of text block speckled blue. Tables and equations. Ownership signature of W. Gordon to each Glenie volume. A Geometrical Investigation lacking the first plate and the full title, and bound in with the half title only. Boards worn and chipped with some loss from the spine, which has been professionally conserved by Bainbridge Conservation, joints cracked but still firm, some offsetting and spotting to contents, particularly the Tables of Interest. Very good condition.
Fenn, Lady Ellenor | A Short History of Insects
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First and only edition of this rare work on entomology for children by the prolific educational author Lady Ellenor Fenn (1744-1815), who wrote under the pseudonyms Mrs. Teachwell and Mrs. Lovechild.
Fenn had no children of her own, but she and her husband, the antiquarian John Fenn, raised an orphan heiress and frequently looked after their nieces and nephews, for whom she began writing, illustrating, and binding manuscripts. She was influenced by Anna Letitia Barbauld's Lessons for Children (1778), and her early works were on manners, though she branched out to other non-fiction topics. “Her most famous title, Cobwebs to Catch Flies (1783–4), contained dialogues for teaching reading. A copy was received in the royal nursery, and it went through many editions in Britain and America until the 1870s. Ellenor was particularly interested in educating girls, and many titles were issued in the series Mrs Teachwell's Library for Young Ladies” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
The preface to this volume opens with the observation that, "Natural History seems likely to become the amuseument of our Wives and Children; but the enormous expence of books on that subject; and other reasons still more cogent, point out the expedience of an epitome for the use of Ladies and Young Persons”. She also focused on mothers, writing book and producing games and other educational material to assist them in teaching material that they may not have had the opportunity to learn in their own youth.
This volume is also connected with the Leverian Museum, being a “pocket companion” to the collection that was built over many years by Sir Ashton Lever and was particularly rich in natural history specimens, as well as material from the Cook expeditions. The Museum was exhibited in Leicester Square between 1775 and 1786 (and was purchased by the physician James Parkinson in 1784), then for another twenty years across the Thames at the Blackfriars Rotunda. Fenn wrote another book based on its contents, on quadrupeds, published in 1792.
Fenn “realized the importance of pictures as an aid to learning and published several volumes of woodcuts for children, and seems to have maintained a close practical contact with her publisher in the layout and production of her works, which contain large types with wide margins.” This volume includes eight attractive, hand-coloured plates by the Suffolk engraver George Quinton (1776-1851).
“Ellenor Fenn's works were popular and well reviewed in her day and regularly reprinted until the 1860s. However, her formulaic output, her disapproval of imaginative stories, her insistence on class distinctions, and her determination 'to correct some of the foibles incident to girls' (Mrs Teachwell, Female Guardian, title-page) have not endeared her to twentieth-century critics... Yet she had humour and realized that the educational process must be enjoyable to both adult and child. Above all she had the gift of communicating with children at their own level” (ODNB).
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...(Extracted from Works of Credit) Designed as an Introduction to the Study of that Branch of Natural History, and as a Pocket Companion to those who Visit the Leverian Museum. Norwich: Stevenson and Matchett, et al., 1797.
Duodecimo in sixes (185 x 110 mm). Original paste boards, recently rebacked to style with paper, new paper title label Hand-coloured, engraved frontispiece and 7 plates of which 3 are folding, by G, Quinton. Ownership initials to front free endpaper and monogram bookplate. Rebacked, as noted. Boards worn and dulled, lower corner knocked, contents clean. A very good copy.
Cotton, Lizzie E. | Bee Keeping for Profit
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RESERVED Second edition of this rare example of a commercial beekeeping work by a woman, first published in 1880.
Author Lizzie Cotton describes herself in the introduction as a professional apiarist “engaged in raising honey for market”, and this volume was published to advertise the “Controllable Hive”, which she invented, and the “New System of Bee Management” she developed for it. The hive was designed with separate glass boxes on the tops and sides for honeycomb production, and she claimed that her system provided regular feeding so that colonies survived the winter, prevented swarming, and increased honey production and profits. Cotton writes that she distrusted “patented” hive designs as often being swindles, and did not patent hers so that anyone could construct their own “for much cheaper than I furnish them”, though she was willing to sell a hive with two sample glass honey boxes for eight dollars, or with a full set of glass boxes for twelve.
It seems that there was much controversy about Cotton within the apiarist community. “Her name cropped up regularly in the Humbugs and Swindlers column in Bee Culture. People complained that their bees had swarmed, and they had not made a profit from their bees. Cotton also had a tendency to advertise a sale on her hives after the sale had already expired” (Horn, Beeconomy, p. 187). In a letter to bee culture in the 1886 a correspondent writes that a swarm he ordered from her was of high quality and producing well in a Controllable Hive. The editors respond that “We are very glad to get the above report... With the very large prices Mrs. Cotton charges for whatever she advertises, she certainly ought to give good measure and good quality, and we are very glad if she is beginning to do so” (Bee Culture, July 15, 1886, p. 588).
Cotton herself hits back in the introduction to this volume, writing that “Since the day I introduced my Controllable Hive and New System of Bee Management to the notice of the public, the worthless bee hive swindlers and their tools have been boiling over with wrath against me, lying and slandering me through the public journals, and especially through the Bee Journals, and all because, that I, a woman, had succeeded in inventing a bee hive and new system of bee management superior to anything yet produced, and which was fast coming into use on its merits, among bee keepers; and consequently the sale of other hives was decreasing in the same proportion.”
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...A New System of Bee Management. Second Edition. Illustrated. Price One Dollar. West Gorham, Maine: privately published, 1883.
Octavo. Original purple cloth with Greek key design blocked in blind to the boards. Engraved portrait frontispiece and illustrations throughout the text. Contemporary ownership inscription of Marcus J. James to the front pastedown. Cloth rubbed and marked with wear at the extremities, upper corner bumped, hinges cracked. Good condition.
Gowing, Margaret | Britain and Atomic Energy
£650.00
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RESERVED First editions, first impressions. The complete set of this important work by the foremost historian of Britain’s nuclear policy, together with the uncommon guide to the unpublished government papers cited in the first book, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945. Rare in such nice condition.
Margaret Gowing (1921-1998) “was at once a distinguished historian and a redoubtable champion of a variety of causes that reflected her keen perception of what constituted the public interest. Her scholarly reputation rested primarily on her magisterial studies of atomic energy in Britain during and after the Second World War” (obituary in the Independent, November 20, 1998).
Gowing took a First in economic history at the London School of Economics in 1941, then held posts at the Ministry of Supply and Board of Trade, followed by the Cabinet Office, where she spent fourteen years as part of the team producing civil histories of the Second World War. In 1959 she joined the Atomic Energy Authority as historian and archivist.
“In Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945 (1964) and its two-volume sequel, Independence and Deterrence (1974, written with the assistance of her friend and collaborator Lorna Arnold), she offered a characteristically clear-eyed account of the fashioning and implementation of British policy with regard to atomic energy from the outbreak of the war until October 1952, when "Hurricane" - the test of a rather primitive bomb at Monte Bello, a group of islands off the north-west coast of Australia - propelled Britain to the status of the world's third nuclear power.
These books, along with her many articles, major public lectures, and penetrating reviews, established her not merely as a peerless chronicler and analyst of a crucial facet of the war effort and of Britain's subsequent struggles to maintain great power status, but also as a leading commentator on the relations between science and government. Her election first to the British Academy in 1975 and 13 years later to the Royal Society recognised equally the quality and the breadth of her work and placed her, with Sir Karl Popper and Joseph Needham, among the tiny handful of those who have been Fellows of both bodies” (the Independent).
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Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945 [together with] Britain and Atomic Energy: Independence and Deterrence 1945-1952, volume I Policy Making, and volume II Policy Execution [and] References to Official Papers, July 1980. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. & the Authority Historian’s Office, 1964, 1974 & 1980.
Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945: Octavo. Original red cloth, titles to spine in copper on black ground and in gilt. With the dust jacket that is price-clipped and has contemporary Macmillan price tickets to the front flap. Cloth only very lightly rubbed at the extremities, a little spotting to the top edge of the text block, minor creasing to the lower corner of the prefatory leaves. An excellent, fresh copy in the price-clipped jacket that is a little rubbed, toned, and creased along the edges.
Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945: References to Official Papers: 32-page photocopied pamphlet, wire-stitched, in green wrappers printed in black. Fine condition.
Britain and Atomic Energy 1945-1952: Independence and Deterrence, volume I: Original dark blue cloth, titles to spine gilt, blue endpapers and top edge. Corners bumped, spine slightly rolled, short closed tears affecting the margin of pages 97-100. An excellent copy in the jacket that is lightly rubbed along the edges.
Britain and Atomic Energy 1945-1952: Independence and Deterrence, volume 2: Original dark blue cloth, titles to spine gilt, blue endpapers and top edge. Corners bumped, spine slightly rolled. An excellent copy in the jacket that is lightly rubbed along the edges. 4 double-sided plates from photographs in each of the three primary volumes.
Vernon, M. D. | Visual Perception
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First edition, first impression. A lovely, fresh copy of this important work.
Magdalen Dorothea Vernon (1901-1999) studied psychology at Newnham College, Cambridge, then carried out experimental research with Professor Frederick Bartlett at the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory. “There she studied eye movements in proofreading and then moved into the broader area of visual perception. Vernon was internationally recognised for her experimental study of reading, published in 1931. After examining the flicker phenomenon in binocular fusion, she wrote a widely read book on visual perception toward the end of the decade [the present volume]. She also collaborated with Kenneth Clark on a study of dark adaptation. By 1946, Vernon was offered a lectureship at reading rising to the rank of reader and head of department. She trained an important group of psychologists at Reading and was noted for her good humour and her direct approach... Her last book, published when she was seventy, again examined reading difficulties” and in the same year she was made an honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society.
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Cambridge: at the University Press, 1937.
Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to spine gilt. Diagrams within the text. Minor bump to lower corner. Excellent condition.
Neurath, Marie | Inside the Atom
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RESERVED First edition, first impression of this important work of science illustration by data-visualisation pioneer Marie Neurath (1898-1986).
Neurath, together with her husband Otto and their colleague Gerd Arntz, was one of the founders of Isotype, a simplified visual method of displaying complex information to the public. First developed in the 1920s, and originally known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, the goal of Isotype was ”to cross national and social divides in a time before widespread global communication. To do that, Isotype went back to basics and stripped away all things unnecessary, illogical, or alienating—and in doing so, helped to establish some of the core principles of graphic design. Today, Isotype’s legacy can be seen everywhere from newspapers and textbooks to signage, transit maps, interfaces, and emojis” (Inglis, “Meet Marie Neurath,” AIGA Eye on Design, September 17, 2019).
Marie Neurath “was a remarkable practitioner” who “researched, calculated, and co-designed nearly every Isotype ever created, from the early days in Vienna in 1925 all the way to when she retired in 1971” (Forrest, “The Missing Legacy of Marie Neurath,” Medium, January 20, 2020). She described her role as that of the “Transformer” of data, writing that “From the data given in words and figures, a way has to be found to extract the essential facts and put them into picture form. It is the responsibility of the transformer to understand the data, to get all necessary information from the expert, to decide what is worth transmitting to the public, how to make it understandable, how to link it with general knowledge or with information already given in other charts. In this sense, the transformer is the trustee of the public” (Neurath, The Transformer, 2009).
Marie continued the work after Otto’s death in 1945, becoming best known for the series of children’s books she published over the next twenty years. “In children’s educational books Marie found an ideal place to put Isotype’s methods into practice. Young readers were more engaged by pictures than words, and this focus on the visual meant these books were easily translated and published abroad, fulfilling Isotype’s original aims of being truly international” (Inglis).
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London: Max Parrish, Isotype. Printed by Graphic Reproductions Ltd., 1956.
Quarto. Original red cloth-patterned boards, titles to spine and upper board, and crystal design to upper board gilt. 3-colour offset lithography. Corners bumped, spine rolled, boards darkened corresponding to jacket chips, contents toned with occasional small spots, spotting to edges of text block. A good copy in the dulled and marked jacket with chips from the corners and ends of the spine, and a closed tear running halfway up the spine panel.
Hyman, Libbie Henrietta | Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy
£20.00
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Second impression of the second edition of this classic textbook that was originally published in 1922. A battered copy that is of interest for the extensive notes and other signs of use by university students. The ownership inscriptions on the front free endpaper are “A. Graham Zool ‘48” and “Sydeny Rosen Meds 49”. The text is full of notes and underlining in multiple pencil colours and by different hands; some of the illustrations have been coloured in for study purposes; and material has also been taped in and loosely inserted, including a library card for the London Public Library belonging to the same Arthur Graham who signed the book.
The author of this textbook, Libbie Henrietta Hyman (1888-1969) developed her interest in natural science as a child and majored in zoology at the University of Chicago. “Encouraged by Mary Blount, a doctoral candidate who was in charge of the elementary zoology laboratory, Hyman took Charles Manning Child’s invertebrate zoology class during her senior year. So impressed was Child by her abilities that he suggested she attend graduate school. After she received her bachelor’s degree in zoology, she became Child’s graduate student. Hyman replaced Blount as the laboratory assistant in zoology and comparative vertebrate anatomy. this experience led her to write two very successful and financially remunerative laboratory manuals. The royalties on these early books made her financially independent” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 637).
Hyman continued in her role as laboratory assistant for sixteen years, then moved to New York City to pursue her goal of writing a major monograph on the invertebrates. The American Museum provided her with an office, laboratory, and library access, and she spent the next thirty years working on the multi-volume treatise, the last volume of which was published in 1967, while continuing to study and publish on all aspects of invertebrate biology. Hyman was also editor of the journal Systemic Zoology, vice president of the American Society of Zoologists, and president of the Society of Systematic Zoology, and received numerous honorary doctorates, two gold medals and the Daniel Giraud Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.
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Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, April 1943.
Large octavo. Original buff cloth, titles to spine and upper board in red. Illustrations throughout the text. Ownership inscriptions to the front free endpaper, manuscript notes and underlining throughout, a few pieces of related material taped-in and loosely inserted, cloth rubbed, scratched, and marked, large gauge from the spine, which is also rolled, wear at the corners and spine ends. A good copy.
Robertson-Miller, Ellen. Butterfly and Moth Book
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First edition, first printing. A beautiful copy of this uncommon and attractively designed work on butterflies and moths with numerous illustrations by the author.
Ellen Bell Robertson-Miller (1859-1937) was a noted painter, naturalist, and columnist who studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students’ League of New York. In addition to entomology, Robertston-Miller was interested in marine life and ornithology, and often held speaking engagements and published articles on natural subjects. She was co-author of Wild Flowers of the North-Eastern States (1895) with Margaret Christine Whiting.
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...Personal Studies and Observations of the More Familiar Species. With Illustrations from Drawings by the Author and Photographs by J. Lyonel King, G. A. Bash, Dr. F. D. Snyder and Others. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912.
Octavo. Original grey cloth elaborately blocked with an Art Nouveau design of a yellow swallowtail butterfly to the upper board and spine, buff endpapers. Photographic frontispiece with tissue guard, illustrations throughout the text from both photographs and drawings. Bookplate of John M. Witheridge. Fine condition.
Strömberg, Gustaf | The Soul of the Universe
£200.00
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First edition, first printing. Presentation copy inscribed on the front free endpaper, first from the author to astronomer Frank E. Ross: “With best wishes from Gustaf Stromberg, April, 1940”. Later, on June 1, 1954, Ross inscribed the book for “Dr. A. R. Sandage, Comps of F. E. Ross”. The second recipient, Allan R. Sandage, was the astronomer who determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble Constant and the age of the universe and was considered “the greatest and most influential observational astronomer of the last half-century” (NY Times obituary, November 17, 2010).
Author Gustaf Stromberg (1882-1962) was an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California who specialised in the luminosity of long-period variable stars and on stellar motions and their implications for the movements of galaxies and nebulae. He also became interested in psychic and paranormal phenomena, and published his pseudoscientific theories about the spiritual aspects of matter and the soul’s immortality in the present volume.
Frank E. Ross (1874-1960) earned his doctorate in 1901 at the University of California, then served as director of the International Latitude Observatory station in Gaithersburg, Maryland, as a physicist at Eastman Kodak, and finally as an astronomer at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. Among his important contributions were the design of wide-angle lenses for astronomical photography; solving problems with photographic emulsions that had caused distortion in astronomical photographs; the discovery of many new variable and high-motions stars; the delineation of the large-scale structures of the northern Milky Way using the lens he developed; and important investigations of the surfaces of Mars and Venus (Morgan, National Academy of Sciences biographical sketch, 1967).
Allan R. Sandage (1926-2010) completed his physics degree at the University of Illinois in 1948, then became a graduate student at Caltech, where he “learned the nuts and bolts of observing with big telescopes [at the Mount Wilson Observatory] from the founders of modern cosmology, Hubble; Walter Baade, who became his thesis adviser, and Milton Humason, a former mule driver who had become Hubble’s right-hand man” (NY Times). “For his doctoral thesis he studied the stars in the globular cluster Messier 3 and the RR Lyrae variable stars it contains. Refinements in the accuracy of the distances to variable stars became a recurring theme of his work, as these were the first step in determining the ladder of distances through which the true scale of the universe was measured” (Guardian obituary, December 9, 2010).
Sandage’s first major contribution was the 1961 paper, “The Ability of the 200-inch Telescope to Discriminate Between Selected World Models”, which “may well have been ‘the most influential paper ever written in any field even close to cosmology’... It was to set the direction of observational cosmology for 40 years, ruling out the Steady State and the Big Crunch and culminating in the surprise discovery in 1998 that the expansion is not slowing down at all but speeding up” (NY Times). Next, by investigating the motion of old stars in the Milky Way, he and two co-authors showed in 1962 “that that the Milky Way formed from the collapse of a primordial gas cloud probably some 10 billion years ago. That paper still forms the basis of science’s understanding of where the galaxy came from” (NY Times). He continually revised the estimate of Hubble’s constant, the speed at which the universe is expanding. “By 1975 the value, they said, was all the way down to 50, corresponding to an age of as much as 20 billion years, comfortably larger than the ages of galaxies and globular clusters. This allowed them to conclude that the universe was not slowing down enough for gravity to reverse the expansion into a Big Crunch. That was in happy agreement with astronomers who had found that there was not enough matter in the universe to generate the necessary gravity” (NY Times).
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Philadelphia: David McKay Company, 1940.
Octavo. Original blue cloth, titles to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. Some uneven tanning of the endpapers, contents faintly toned. A very good copy in the rubbed, nicked, and tanned jacket with some dark marks and a few chips.
Harrison, Stephen | Emanational Physics. A New Theoretical Prolegomenon
£650.00
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The “second edition” of this rare and unusual self-published text proposing to correct the entire field of modern physics by reframing it metaphysically. Described as a “not-for-sale” edition “limited to 100 copies”, this copy was sent to Allan R. Sandage, the astronomer who determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble Constant and the age of the universe and was considered “the greatest and most influential observational astronomer of the last half-century” (NY Times obituary, November 17, 2010). Sandage’s name appears twice on the recipients list in the front matter (once as no. 2 on the list, and then misspelled on a taped and glued-on addition) and an introductory letter from the author to Sandage, dated 1993, is loosely inserted.
We have been unable to locate much information on the author, Stephen Harrison. The biography on the verso of the dedication leaf describes him as “a science graduate of London University” and “now an American citizen” who is “currently an independent consultant in the ‘High Technology’ field in the Washington D. C. area”. His business card describes him as the “principal scientist” for Directed Technologies, Inc. of Bethesda Maryland, of which we can find no record. The printed address on the card is for a suburban house, and it has been crossed out and corrected with another address for an apartment complex about a mile away. Surprisingly, Harrison has a Linkedin profile, though it is empty except for his title, “independent computer software professional, Bethesda Maryland” and his education history: “London University 1938-1948”. There is no “London University” (at least not since 1836), and it is unclear whether this is entirely fictitious, or if he meant one of the real institutions with a similar name. And while the dates seem questionable, as they put him in his late 80s when Linkedin was founded, an obituary confirming his age appeared in the Washington Post on March 16th, 2016: “Stephen Harrison, philosopher, author of The New Monadology, died peacefully March 12, 2016 at age 96 with his daughters Barbara Harrison and Frances Stroscio by his side”.
In the prefatory matter Harrison also lists three other books he has written: “The Mind/Brain Problem, copyright 1981/1982/1984/1986”, “Artificial Intelligence: A House Built Upon the Sand, 1984”, and “The New Monadology (forthcoming)”. We can locate no institutional copies of Emanational Physics, and only one institutional copy of any of the other books: The New Monadology, at Perdue University, though the copyright date provided in WorldCat is 1981, which would be significantly earlier than indicated by the information here.
This copy seems have been mailed to Sandage a few years after “publication”, as the enclosed letter is dated May 29th, 1993 (as Sandage’s name appears twice in the recipients list, it may have been sent twice). Harrison writes, “I believe you will enjoy some of the chapters of the enclosed, though I fear you must end up dismissing me as a good man gone wrong. One of my complaints with modern cosmology is the way in which they proceed sui generis in the absence of the broader considerations of Mind and Spirituality — which are, so to speak, brought in as afterthoughts, rather than being given equal weight at the outset. Also, the failure to distinguish between Eternity and Endless Time; and between the Potential and the Completed Infinity. Finitude and Temporality, surely, belong in the realm of physical existence, with Infinity and Eternity providing the necessary context beyond.”
The contents of this volume are difficult to describe, but comprise an elaborate, conservative-leaning pseudo-scientific/philosophical critique of modern physics and cosmology, primarily relativity, quantum mechanics, positivism, and materialist understandings of human consciousness. As Harrison writes in the preface, “It is no secret that the state of theoretical physics & cosmology is replete with contradictions and paradoxes. It’s a mess — and, according to such Establishment spokesmen as Richard Feynman, there’s not much we can do about it. Nature is ‘absurd’ and we have no choice but to accept the fact with as good a grace as we are able to muster. I don’t believe it... What’s wrong with physics takes origin, in my view, from what’s wrong with physicists. What is chiefly wrong with physicists is that they are metaphysically light-weight... this handicap of philosophical myopia is canonised into the virtue of emancipation; they believe that the findings and discoveries of physics have somehow pre-empted metaphysics — which may now be discarded as so much useless baggage — and that empiricism has somehow proved itself to be completely self-contained and self-sufficient.”
Not surprisingly, he goes on to explain that, “undaunted by my limited grasp of modern physics, I decided to blunder in, and try my hand at clearing up the mess. What are my credentials? First, I am familiar with the basics and have enough understanding of mathematics to be able to protect myself from the occasional abuses of mathematicians. I have spent much of my life as a consultant in various areas of ‘hard’ science and engineering, and my experience in this occupation has caused me to become monumentally unimpressed by and suspicious of ‘experts’; one thing in which many of them are truly expert in is seeing the trees and missing the woods”.
The text itself is dense and complex, with numerous citations and illustrations, a few of which are coloured in by hand. It begins with an introduction to some of the mysteries and paradoxes of modern physics and a historical outline of “how we got into the present mess”, as well as chapters titled “Ad Hominem: The Intellectual Scrutinized” and “The Decay of Common Sense”. Harrison’s solution to these problems, a system he terms “emanational physics” involves building blocks called “corpuscles” and “reintroducing the Aether” to theory, and it covers the mind, the fabric of the universe, and his conceptualisation of the origin and end of the universe — what he calls the Alpha and Omega.
In the preface, Harrison explains that this second edition has appeared only six months after the first, “chiefly as a result of my very recent discovery of literature sources critical of relativity. At the same time I learned why I had to dig so deep to find this material; it seems it is not easy to publish material contrary to the Establishment Doctrine... In reviewing this material I cannot help but conclude that the case against special relativity is about as solid as can be... I am even tempted to say that it is the most disconfirmed hypothesis since the Phlogiston Theory. Yet it retains its firm occupancy of Stage Center”.
Among the 90 recipients of this text (who must have been thrilled) are mathematician Roger Penrose, AI and information theorist Kenneth M. Sayre, and physicists Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, John Archibald Wheeler, James Hartle, and Sheldon Glashow (among many others). A number of non-scientists are also included, such as the conservative political philosopher Paul Gottfried, Scottish Protestant theologian Thomas F. Torrance, Benedictine historian of science Stanley Jaki, and religious philosopher Richard Swinbourne.
Most remarkably, at least a few of them engaged somewhat seriously with Harrison’s text. In the preface he thanks “a number of readers who sent in their comments in response to the original edition — spanning various degrees of agreement and disagreement; several of them brought an important error to my attention (concerning the astronaut round-trip paradox)”. Mathematician Joseph Gerver is specially praised for “his very detailed commentary on a number of points”. And not only did neuroscientist and philosopher Raymond Tallis read Emanational Physics, he cited it in his 1991 book on consciousness, The Explicit Animal. Harrison had used a quotation he attributed to physicist David Bohm, and Tallis includes it in The Explicit Animal, with a footnote reading, “I do not know the original provenance of this passage. It is cited by Stephen Harrison in his remarkable unpublished manuscript Emanational Physics”. The same passage is then used by philosopher Mary Midgley in her book The Ethical Primate, with a footnote referring to Tallis and Harrison: “Tallis says no further details are given. The passage seems, however, to express Bohm’s habitual views and does not in any way appear suspect”.
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...Second Edition. Bethesda, Maryland: privately published, 1988.
Comb-bound photocopy, text on both the rectos and versos. Title on yellow paper. Original brown paper covers, the upper cover with a plastic window for the title and “BK Dynamics” embossed in gold. The author’s Directed Technologies business card, with the address corrected by hand, is stapled to the upper cover. Illustrations, charts and graphs throughout, one coloured by hand. The author’s name and address in pencil partially erased from the title. Occasional additions and corrections made by taping or pasting in new slips of paper.
Wright, F. E, F. H., and Helen | The Lunar Surface: Introduction
£450.00
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A rare offprint of a book chapter by the geologist and optical scientist who was considered the foremost authority on the Moon. This copy is inscribed for presentation by his daughter and co-author, science historian Helen Wright, and it comes from the library of Allan R. Sandage, the astronomer who determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble Constant and the age of the universe and was considered “the greatest and most influential observational astronomer of the last half-century” (NY Times obituary, November 17, 2010). Worldcat locates only two other copies of this offprint, at the Huntington and the US Naval Observatory.
Frederick Eugene Wright (1877-1953) spent much of his career at the Carnegie Institute, where he led the Moon Project at the Mount Wilson observatory and “specialized in mineralogy, crystallography and petrology. He developed various optical instruments, chiefly for petrology, and also wrote on the manufacture of optical glass... Wright took a special interest in studying the Moon. He charted all aspects of the orb from its chemical and mineralogical content to the characteristics of its craters and seas and its temperatures. So extensive and detailed was his work that the Moon’s Wright Crater is named after him and two other astronomers” (Optical Society of America biography).
Wright’s daughter Helen began her career as an assistant at Mount Wilson, researching the history of telescopes, and she also worked at the Vassar and U. S. Naval Observatories. Among her publications were biographies of astronomers George Ellery Hale and Maria Mitchell. She has inscribed this copy “Speaking of the Moon! All the best, Helen Wright”. We strongly suspect that it was inscribed for Allan Sandage’s wife, the astronomer Mary Connelly, who had studied at Indiana University and Radcliffe, and was teaching at Mount Holyoke when they met and married.
Allan R. Sandage (1926-2010) completed his physics degree at the University of Illinois in 1948, then became a graduate student at Caltech, where he “learned the nuts and bolts of observing with big telescopes [at the Mount Wilson Observatory] from the founders of modern cosmology, Hubble; Walter Baade, who became his thesis adviser, and Milton Humason, a former mule driver who had become Hubble’s right-hand man” (NY Times). “For his doctoral thesis he studied the stars in the globular cluster Messier 3 and the RR Lyrae variable stars it contains. Refinements in the accuracy of the distances to variable stars became a recurring theme of his work, as these were the first step in determining the ladder of distances through which the true scale of the universe was measured” (Guardian obituary, December 9, 2010).
Sandage’s first major contribution was the 1961 paper, “The Ability of the 200-inch Telescope to Discriminate Between Selected World Models”, which “may well have been ‘the most influential paper ever written in any field even close to cosmology’... It was to set the direction of observational cosmology for 40 years, ruling out the Steady State and the Big Crunch and culminating in the surprise discovery in 1998 that the expansion is not slowing down at all but speeding up” (NY Times). Next, by investigating the motion of old stars in the Milky Way, he and two co-authors showed in 1962 “that that the Milky Way formed from the collapse of a primordial gas cloud probably some 10 billion years ago. That paper still forms the basis of science’s understanding of where the galaxy came from” (NY Times). He continually revised the estimate of Hubble’s constant, the speed at which the universe is expanding. “By 1975 the value, they said, was all the way down to 50, corresponding to an age of as much as 20 billion years, comfortably larger than the ages of galaxies and globular clusters. This allowed them to conclude that the universe was not slowing down enough for gravity to reverse the expansion into a Big Crunch. That was in happy agreement with astronomers who had found that there was not enough matter in the universe to generate the necessary gravity” (NY Times).
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...Reprinted from Middlehurst and Kuiper: The Moon, Meteorites, and Comets (The Solar System, Vol. IV). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963.
56-page pamphlet, wire-stitched. Original buff wrappers printed in black. 3 double-sided plates, illustrations and charts within the text. Wrappers a little creased and toned, with some small marks and scratches, minor crease affecting the lower corner of the contents. Very good condition
[Vyssotsky] Williams, Emma T. R., et al. | The Fundamental Properties of the Galactic System.
£450.00
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First edition, first printing of this collection of eight papers from the New York Academy of Science’s conference on the Fundamental Properties of the Galactic System, held in New York on May 2nd and 3rd, 1941. One of the papers, “Mean Parallaxes from Peculiar Motions”, is by the prominent female astronomer Emma Vyssotsky (née Williams).
This copy from the library of Allan R. Sandage, the most important astronomy and cosmologist of his generation, who determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble Constant and the age of the universe. With the ownership initials of his wife, the astronomer Mary Connelly, who had studied at Indiana University and Racliffe, and was teaching at Mount Holyoke when they met (New York Times obituary, November 17, 2010).
Vyssotsky (1894-1975) studied mathematics and astronomy as an undergraduate at Swarthmore, then researched A-type (young, energetic) stars from the Harvard Observatory for her Radcliffe Phd. While she was a postgraduate researcher at the University of Virginia’s McCormick Observatory she met and married fellow astronomy Alexander N. Vyssotsky. “She remained for the rest of her career at the University of Virginia, first as a research fellow and instructor in astronomy, and then, at age fifty, began to work with her husband on a book on stellar motions, published four years later” (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science p. 1333).
Vyssotsky and her husband studied “stellar parallaxes by applying trigonometric functions to observations made on multiple photographic exposures. They discovered many of these parallaxes by attaching a special objective prism to the observatory's astrograph. Their research led to accurate calculations of stellar motions and the determination of the structure of galaxies” (Oakes, Encyclopedia of World Scientists). In 1946 Vyssotsky was awarded the American Astronomical Society’s Annie Jump Canon Award in Astronomy in recognition of her contributions to the field of stellar spectra.
This volume also contains papers by Peter van de Kamp, Dirk Brouwer, W. J. Luyten, Jan Schilt, and Frederick Seares, among others. It was edited by astronomer Bart J. Bok, who met Sandage when he was an undergraduate and was influential in the direction his career took.
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...Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Volume XLII, Art 2. Pages 113-272. New York: by the Academy, October 15, 1941.
Octavo. Original tan wrappers printed in black. Charts and graphs within the text. Ownership initials in black ink to the upper wrapper. Some loss from the ends of the spine, wrappers rubbed and toned with few small marks and some mild creasing. Very good condition.