London: John Murray, 1872. First edition, first issue. “This is an important member of the evolutionary set, and it was written, in part at least, as a confutation of the idea that the facial muscles of expression in man were a special endowment” (Freeman, p. 141). “With this book Darwin..... More
Item #5609
Cambridge: [the University Press for the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 1835. First edition, very rare, inscribed by John Stevens Henslow, of Darwin’s first separately printed work and his first account in print of his discoveries on the Beagle. “During his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle, Darwin maintained a correspondence with John..... More
Item #5657
London: John Murray, 1859. First edition, presentation copy, of “the most influential scientific work of the nineteenth century” (Horblit), “the most important biological work ever written” (Freeman), and “a turning point, not only in the history of science, but in the history of ideas in general” (DSB). “Darwin not only..... More
Item #5658
London: John Murray, 1862. First edition of the first of Darwin’s works to publish extensive evidence supporting his theory of evolution through natural selection. In a letter to his publisher, John Murray, Darwin wrote: “I think this little volume will do good to the Origin, as it will show that..... More
Item #5337
London: John Murray, 1872. Sixth edition (the first to employ the word ‘evolution’), inscribed by Darwin, of “the most influential scientific work of the nineteenth century” (Horblit), “the most important biological work ever written” (Freeman), and “a turning point, not only in the history of science, but in the history..... More
Item #4981
Newcastle: Printed by Edw. Walker for T. Bewick (and others), 1826. Charles Darwin's copy, signed and dated (1840) by him on the title-page of each volume, and containing additional autograph notations by Darwin, particularly with reference to the British finch. This is a highly significant volume from Darwin’s library –..... More
Item #5276
London: Rowland Hunter, 1818. First edition, in a fine contemporary royal binding, of Davy’s invention of the safety lamp, which immediately reduced the number of fatalities in coal mines, also allowed miners to mine deeper than was previously possible and was therefore fundamental to the rapid industrialisation of Britain during..... More
Item #5334
Leyden: Petrus Leffen and Franciscus Moyardus, 1662. First edition of “the first European textbook of physiology” (Norman). “Descartes considered the human body a material machine, directed by a rational soul located in the pineal body. This book was the first attempt to cover the whole field of ‘animal physiology’” (Garrison-Morton)..... More
Item #5655
London: Abell Jeffes, 1591. Second and best edition of this important Elizabethan work on practical geometry, in which “for the first time, we have indications of an instrument which we may call a reflecting telescope” (King, The History of the Telescope, p. 29). This second edition contains several appendices by Thomas..... More
Item #5131
[London: Harrison & Sons for the Royal Society, 1926]. First edition, inscribed presentation offprint, of Dirac’s paper, which “is justly seen as a major contribution to quantum theory” (Kragh, p. 36). It introduced his quantum mechanical derivation of what is now called Fermi-Dirac statistics, which describes a distribution of particles..... More
Item #4390
Paris: Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy at l’Imprimerie Royale, 1675 [colophon date]-1676 [title page date]. First edition of “one of the great books in the history of botanical illustration, where all the technical resources of engraving were utilized in presenting the plants as accurately as possible” (Hunt), here accompanied by 5 additional engraved..... More
Item #5358
Venice: Tomasso Baglioni, 1611. First edition, extremely rare, of this important early work on the optics of the telescope and related optical phenomena, and containing the first essentially correct theory of the rainbow to be published. Dominis and Galileo were both teaching mathematics and physics in Padua at the same..... More
Item #5287
Prague: Gottlieb Haase & Sons, 1846. First edition, very rare separately-paginated offprint, of this important complement to Doppler’s epoch-making discovery in 1842 of the principle named after him. The three articles comprising this offprint contain extensions of the Doppler principle, as well as the first suggestion to use photographic and..... More
Item #4936
[Cambridge: University Press, 1905]. First edition, extremely rare offprint, inscribed by Edgeworth, of his most important contribution to mathematical statistics. “The most important of the papers relating to this subject” (Bowley). “‘Of all the great economists in this book, he [Edgeworth] is (apart from Bernoulli and Slutsky) the only one..... More
Item #4955
Lancaster, PA: American Physical Society, 1945-46. First edition, extremely rare offprints, of Einstein & Straus’s introduction of the ‘Swiss-cheese’ model of the universe. “After [a] decade and a half of sometimes intense work on cosmology, Einstein returned to the subject only occasionally in his later years. His most significant later..... More
Item #5054
Lancaster, PA: American Physical Society, 1935. First edition, very rare offprint, of the famous ‘EPR paper’, one of the most discussed and debated papers of modern physics, and the foundation for the new fields of quantum computing and cryptography. “In the May 15, 1935 issue of Physical Review Albert Einstein..... More
Item #5045
Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1914. First edition, extremely rare author’s presentation offprint (with ‘Überreicht vom Verfasser’ (Presented by the Author) printed on front wrapper), and the copy of Einstein’s close friend and colleague Paul Ehrenfest, of this crucial transitional paper in which Einstein uses the light quantum hypothesis to give..... More
Item #4295
Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1914. First edition of this extremely rare offprint, a remarkable association copy inscribed by the theoretical physicist Gunnar Nordström, often designated by modern writers as ‘The Einstein of Finland’. Einstein had an extended correspondence with Nordström on the subject of Nordström’s own competing theory of..... More
Item #4585
Berlin: George Reimer for the Königlich Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1915. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of one of Einstein’s most important papers, in which “he presents two of his greatest discoveries. Each of these changed his life” (Pais, p. 253). “In the fall of 1915, Einstein came..... More
Item #4849
Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1911. First edition, rare author’s presentation offprint (with ‘Überreicht vom Verfasser’ (Presented by the Author) stamped on front wrapper), and the copy of Einstein’s son Hans Albert, of Einstein’s “first paper completely devoted to general relativity” (Brandt, p. 105). This epochal paper applies the equivalence principle..... More
Item #5081
Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1929. First edition, offprint issue, signed by Einstein, of one of his most important papers on unified field theory, with an accompanying typed letter signed to Reginald B. Haselden, who was Curator of Manuscripts at the Huntington Library during Einstein’s time at the California Institute of..... More
Item #5292
[Pennsylvania: n.p., ca. 1945]. Rare photograph, much reproduced in the computer literature, of “the world’s first large-scale general-purpose electronic digital computer” (OOC, p. 532). ENIAC was “built during World War II by the United States. American physicist John Mauchly, American engineer J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and their colleagues at the..... More
Item #5514
[Colophon:] Vicenza: Leonardus de Basilea and Gulielmusde Papia, 20 June 1491. A fine copy, with wide margins, of the second edition of the “oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today” (PMM), “much more uncommon than the edtio princeps” (Thomas-Stanford, p. 5), and especially rare in an unrestored contemporary binding..... More
Item #5194
St. Petersburg: ex Typographia Academiae Scientiarum, 1739. First edition, and a remarkable copy in original state, of Euler’s most important work on music. The Swiss mathematician, scientist and philosopher Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) “contributed more to theoretical acoustics as the subject is now known than has any other man” (The New..... More
Item #5636
Padua: Lorenzo Pasquati, 1603. First edition, very rare first separate issue (see below), “of the first systematic study of the structure, distribution and position of the venous valves. Although the valves of the veins had been observed previously by G.B. Canano and Amato Lusitano, Fabrici studied them anew on the..... More
Item #3909