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Human Sciences

Contact Jonathan Harrison, Alfred Pasternack or Barbara Scalvini

Human Sciences at Quaritch embraces a wide range of books and manuscripts documenting the history of ideas from the earliest times up to about 1960. Our strengths are in the history of economic thought and in philosophy, but we also deal in law; finance and banking (including speculation, actuarial science and insurance); politics and political theory; sociology; psychology; agriculture; education; logic; and the theory of language.

Some notable items which have recently passed through our hands include the only known copy of the Communist Manifesto inscribed by Karl Marx, Rudolf Carnap’s annotated copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung), Joseph Penso de la Vega’s Confusion de Confusiones (1688, the first book to describe the practice of a stock-exchange) and a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (4th edition, 1786), inscribed in Smith's own hand to Bonnie Prince Charlie's private secretary.

As well as dealing in individual books and manuscripts, we also offer collections. In recent years we have sold author collections of Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Thorstein Veblen, Emile Durkheim and Jeremy Bentham. Among subject collections we have offered are the Herwood Library of accounting literature (including Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, 1494, the first printed exposition of double-entry book-keeping); the philosophy of language; texts pertaining to the theory and study of language in the West, and the history of probability - the calculus of probabilities, statistics and their applications.

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  1. [NUPTIALIA.]

    Bartolomeo MOLAJONI.  Alla neogama donzella Marianna Molajoni negli Sforza, Bartolomeo Molajoni germano dirigge il...

    Viterbo, brothers Poggiarelli, 1811. 

    Seemingly unrecorded sonnet addressed to the newlywed Marianna Molajoni by her brother Bartolomeo and dedicated to the sottoprefetto of Viterbo, Giulio Zelli Pazzaglia. 

    £275

  2. JACOBS, H. W.

    Betterment Briefs. A Collection of Published Papers on Organized Industrial Efficiency.

    New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1909.

    Second, definitive edition. ‘The nucleus of the present volume is a series of four articles published by Mr Jacobs in The Engineering Magazine from September, 1906, to January, 1907, under the title “Organization and Economy in the Railway Machine Shop”. This was followed in June by a paper on...

    £220

  3. TUCKER, Josiah.

    Betydande frågor om handelen, wid tilfålle af de motsäjelser, som skedde emot den sista billen, om utlänningars...

    [v. Oelreich], 1763.

    First Swedish edition, scarce, of this history on the treatment of foreign residents in Britain, Reflections on the Expediency of a Law for the Naturalization of Foreign Protestants (1751–1752). This book comprises only the main body of Part II (1752), ‘Important Queries occasioned by The Rejection...

    £200

  4. [ARISTOTLE – ELIAS.]

    Biblioteca Armeno-Georgica. I. Commentarii in Aristotelis Categorias Eliae commentatori adscripti versio...

    St Petersburg, Academiae Imperialis Scientarum, 1911.

    Uncommon edition, published by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, of the Armenian translation of the commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories by the sixth-century Christian philosopher and commentator Elias.

    £250

  5. DIODORUS Siculus.

    Bibliothecae historicae libri XV. Hoc est, quotquot Graece extant de quadraginta quorum quinque nunc primum Latine...

    Basel, Heinrich Petri, August 1559.

    Important edition, the first to be overseen by Sébastien Castellion, of Diodorus’s influential ‘Historical library’.

    £2500

  6. SCHREBER, Johann Christian.

    Botanisch-Oeconomische Abhandlung vom Grasbaue. Preisschrift, welche die, in den öconomischen Nachrichten,...

    Leipzig, Johann Wendler, 1763.

    First separate edition of this prize-winning treatise on grass and hay, first published in the Ökonomische Nachrichten.

    £75

  7. STEPNIAK, Sergey. 

    דאָס אינטערערדישע רוסלאַנד … איבערזעצט פון א. פרומקין
    [Dos...

    New York, Maks N. Maisel, 1921. 

    Scarce first American edition in Yiddish of Stepniak’s first and most influential book.  Written in Italian during exile in Switzerland following his assassination of Nikolai Mezentsov, chief of Alexander II’s secret police, Underground Russia was published in 1882 and translated into...

    £150

  8. [MARTINI, Ferdinand].

    Breife. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt.

    Soröe 1768, gedruckt bey Jonas Lindgreen, Ritterlich Akademischer Buchdrucker.

    First edition of a rare, radical indictment of serfdom in Denmark, ostensibly ‘translated from the English’.

    £750

  9. [BRISTOL.] 

    The Bristol Contest, being a Collection of all the Papers published by both Parties, on the Election, 1754. 

    Bristol, ‘sold by the Printing-Office … and by J. Palmer’, [1754]. 

    Extremely rare first edition of this Bristol-printed political pamphlet, bound with the first edition of a French work on pyrotechnics used both for spectacle and for war. 

    £650

  10. MARTINEAU, Harriet.

    British Rule in India; a historical Sketch …

    London: Smith, Elder and Co … 1857.

    First edition. Martineau wrote regularly for the Daily News from 1851-66, and produced nearly 1600 leaders in which she addessed international issues such as the American Civil War, and Britain’s position in the West Indies, Ireland and India. Her articles on India contributed to this work,...

    £150

  11. [ISLE OF WIGHT.]

    By-laws for the regulation and government of the poor, in the House of Industry, in the Isle of Wight.

    Newport, J. Mallett, 1789.

    First edition thus of a rare survival documenting the transition from the Poor Relief Act of 1662 to the New Poor Law. The Isle of Wight was granted a licence to manage a House of Industry in 1771. This book of its by-laws consequently reflects the growing belief that the poor should be regulated by...

    £950

  12. [LONDON ASSURANCE CORPORATION.]

    By-laws, orders, and rules, for the good government of the corporation of the London assurance....

    London, [n.p.], 1722.

    First edition of the by-laws of the London Assurance Corporation, which, along with The Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation, was constituted and granted sole rights, excepting private individuals, to the granting of assurance and bottomry by ‘The Bubble Act’ of 1720. The right to self-govern, reflected...

    £550

  13. AURIGNAC, Sara Thérèse d’.

    Cahier de dessins.

    [Villiers-en-Bière], c. 1896.

    An album of fin-de-siècle sketches by fifteen-year-old Sara Thérèse d’Aurignac, comprising humorous vignettes, imaginative anthropomorphism, dancing devils, and scenes of leisure.

    £875

  14. SALLUST.

    Caii Sallustii Crispi quae extant.

    London, James Tonson and John Watts, 1713.

    First Maittaire edition. The French-born classical scholar Michel Maittaire (1668–1741) studied at Westminster, and then under Robert South at Christ Church, Oxford. He is best known for his Annales Typographici and the series of duodecimo classics that he published with Tonson and Watts...

    £300

  15. MARX, Karl.

    Capital. A critical analysis of capitalist production … translated from the third edition by Samuel Moore and Edward...

    London, Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., 1887.

    A remarkably well-preserved copy of the first edition, first issue, one of only five hundred copies (Sraffa), of the English translation of Marx’s Das Kapital, published in London four years after Marx’s death under the editorship of Engels.

    £35000

  16. CLIFFORD, Jeronimy.

    The case and replication of the legal representatives of Jeronimy Clifford; a British subject; and late merchant...

    London, C. Say, 1763.

    First edition of this comprehensive summary of Clifford’s long-running legal battle with the Dutch West India Company in Surinam over Corcabo, his sugar plantation, from the Macclesfield library, including a handsome folding ‘map of the colony of Surinam’.

    £850

  17. [CLIFFORD, Jeronimy].

    The case of Jeronimy Clifford, merchant and planter of Surinam. Paper, No. 160.

    [London, n.p., 1711].

    First extended account of Clifford’s long-running legal battle with the Dutch West India Company in Surinam over Corcabo, his sugar plantation. The earlier publications had been just four pages long; this work furnishes us with plantation account details and testimonies, chronologically arranged with...

    £650

  18. AUGIER DU FOT, Anne Amable.

    Catechismo d’ostetricia per istruzione delle mammane di campagna composto per odine e a spese del...

    Venice, Stamperia Graziosi, 1787.

    Uncommon first Italian edition of this handbook of obstetrics, initially published in France at the behest of Turgot in 1775 and distributed gratis to French midwives.

    £550

  19. [PINNOCK, William].

    A catechism of the history of France, containing a clear outline of all the important changes which that country...

    London, Printed by Bensley and Sons for Pinnock and Maunder, [c. 1819].

    Second edition of this much-reprinted guide to French history for British youth from the Roman conquest of Gaul to the fall of Napoleon, one of Pinnock’s many catechisms on historical and scientific subjects.

    £125

  20. BALBUS, Johannes.

    Catholicon.

    [Strasbourg, The R-Printer (Adolf Rusch), not after 1475.]

    Third edition of the earliest printed lexicon, a monumental piece of printing from one of the earliest presses in Strasbourg, containing the thirteenth-century Latin dictionary and grammar of Johannes Balbus, the ‘greatest of the medieval encyclopaedic dictionaries’ (Chamberlin, p. 136); his...

    £65000