Edinburgh; Padua: Andrew Hart; Giacomo Cadorino, 1619; [1667]. First edition, extremely rare, of this complement to Napier’s epoch-making Mirifici logorithmorum canonis descriptio (1614) – while the Descriptio gave the first ever table of logarithms, it was in the Constructio that Napier explained the method of their construction. It is here..... More
Item #4638

Baltimore: Waverley Press, 1953. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, signed by John Nash, of this important paper which set a new entire research agenda that has been referred to as the "Nash program" for cooperative games. "In Nash's (1953) analysis of bargaining, the innovation was to use the..... More
Item #5030

London: for Benjamin Motte, 1729. First edition in English of the Principia, the magnificent Jones-Macclesfield large paper copy in contemporary morocco; with its important provenance, this is surely the most desirable copy in private hands. The first edition was published in Latin in 1687 and “is generally described as the greatest..... More
Item #5105

Leipzig: E.W. Fritzsch, 1872. First edition in exceptionally rare original publisher's cloth binding. This copy previously handled by Bill Schaberg: "When I wrote The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (The University of Chicago Press, 1995), I had never even heard of these cloth copies of Nietzsche’s first book..... More
Item #4535

Munich and Berlin;: R. Oldenbourg, 1923;. First edition, rare, of Oberth’s first work on rocketry, one of the foundation works on the subject, together with an inscribed presentation copy of the first English translation of its revised and greatly enlarged version, Wege zum Raumschiffahrt (1929), which “anticipated by 30 years..... More
Item #5500

New Haven, Connecticut: n.p., July 1969. First edition, very rare, of arguably the single most important work on dinosaurs, by “the most influential palaeontologist of the second half of the 20th century” (Dodson & Gingerich). Prior to Ostrom’s work, dinosaurs were largely depicted as slow-witted, slow-moving, cold-blooded reptiles. This revolutionary..... More
Item #5493

Toscolano: Paganino de’ Paganini, 20 December, 1523. Second edition, very rare, a close reprint of the first edition (Venice, 1494), and a copy with numerous early annotations. The Summa is a work of enormous importance on several levels. It is the first mathematical encyclopaedia of the Renaissance, “the first great..... More
Item #5533

Paris: André Wechel, 1572; 1568. First editions of two of Paré's most important works, both very rare, and in fine condition. “The Cinq livres contains all new material. It had been called by several serious writers Paré's chef d'oeuvre ... in it appears the first description of the fracture of..... More
Item #3697

Bath; Bath & London: printed by R. Cruttwell; and sold by Cadell and Davies; printed by R. Cruttwell & sold by Cadell and Davies, London, J. Collow, 1799; 1806. First edition, rare, of this work in which Parry was the first to make the connection between angina and coronary heart..... More
Item #5028

Paris: Mallet-Bachelier, 1862. First edition, very rare offprint, inscribed by Pasteur. “The longest and most important of Pasteur’s papers on spontaneous generation, describing the series of classic experiments with bent-necked and sealed flasks by which he proved conclusively that fermentation and putrefaction are not the products of spontaneous generation, but..... More
Item #5173

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1926. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of Pauli’s important derivation of the hydrogen spectrum from the new quantum mechanics, providing the first validation of Heisenberg’s theory. As Pauli explains in the abstract: “It is shown that the Balmer terms of an atom with a...... More
Item #3539

Paris: Chez Richard, Caille et Ravier, An IX [1801]. First edition of a landmark work on the treatment of the insane and mentally ill. It presented the textual foundation of psychiatry, stands as the first great publication of the nineteenth century in clinical medicine, and at the same time as..... More
Item #5631

Paris: Gauthier-Villars et Fils, 1892. First edition of Poincaré’s first paper on topology, which gave birth to the subject in its modern sense. “One of the most unexpected developments in twentieth-century mathematics has been the meteoric rise of the subject known as topology. Topology is sometimes described as ‘rubber-sheet geometry’..... More
Item #3776