New catalogue

WITTGENSTEIN: A LIFE IN BOOKS AND LETTERS.  We are pleased to offer in this catalogue a remarkable gathering of autograph letters, annotated or inscribed books, and other artefacts, centred around the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  All stages of his life are represented here: his early experiments in engineering at Manchester; his first stay at Cambridge; working as a primary school teacher in Lower Austria; as an architect in Vienna; his conversations with Moritz Schlick and the Vienna Circle; his return to Cambridge and finally his death and posthumous reputation.

Offered here are letters from many of his friends and collaborators, as well as from family members.  As Brian McGuinness notes in his introduction to Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge letters, ‘in the case of some friends and perhaps all family members [Wittgenstein] kept every letter, but in other cases only a letter or two, perhaps a particularly characteristic one as a kind of memento’ (p. 8).  Among the material gathered here are items from the libraries of the philosopher and peer of Wittgenstein G. E. Moore, and the Wittgenstein scholars Brian McGuinness and Alice Ambrose.  The correspondence is largely drawn from the collection of Ludwig Hänsel, Wittgenstein’s close friend since the First World War, and contains letters from both Wittgenstein and his family to Hänsel.

For further information, please contact Ian Smith.