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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LELAND, John.
The Itinerary of John Leland, in or about the Years 1535-1543. Edited by Lucy Toulmin Smith, with a Foreword by Thomas...
London, Centaur Press Ltd, 1964.
The authoritative edition of Leland’s Itinerary, a monument of English bibliography and antiquarian research. The Itinerary comprises the notes of the antiquary John Leland (c. 1503–1552) on his journeys through England and Wales during the dissolution of the monasteries. According...
£75
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LELAND, John.
The Itinerary of John Leland, in or about the Years 1535-1543. Edited by Lucy Toulmin Smith, with a Foreword by Thomas...
London, Centaur Press Ltd, 1964.
The authoritative edition of Leland’s Itinerary, a monument of English bibliography and antiquarian research. The Itinerary comprises the notes of the antiquary John Leland (c. 1503–1552) on his journeys through England and Wales during the dissolution of the monasteries. According...
£50
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[LE MARCHE.]
Deed relating to the sale of property in Beltrovato (a district of Morrovalle in the Province of Macerata in the...
[Rome, 1616.]
A curiously bound public instrument notarised by the Apostolic Camera in Rome detailing the sale of property belonging to two brothers from the influential de’ Mozzi family of Macerata.
£850
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[LE MERCIER DE LA RIVIÈRE, Pierre Paul].
Die glückliche Nation, oder der Staat von Felizien. Ein Muster der vollkommensten Freyheit...
Leipzig, Voss, 1794.
Very rare first German edition of Le Mercier de la Rivière’s physiocratic utopia L’heureuse nation, ou Relation du gouvernement des Féliciens, which had first appeared in French in 1792.
£1250
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LE MIRE, Aubert (editor).
Rerum toto orbe gestarum chronica a Christo nato ad nostra usque tempora. Auctoribus Eusebio...
Antwerp, apud Hieronymum Verdussium, 1608.
First edition of this collection of chronicles, covering sixteen hundred years of world history from the birth of Christ to its publication, composed by the ecclesiastical historian Aubert le Mire of Brussels, this copy from the library of Jacques Auguste de Thou.
£3750
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[LE NOBLE, Pierre, and Eustache LE NOBLE (attributed).]
Les Amours d’Anne d’Austriche, Epouse de Louis 13. ...
‘A Cologne, Chez Pierre Marteau, 1696’ [France, early eighteenth century].
An early manuscript copy of a salacious – and treasonous – history arguing that Louis XIV was the illegitimate child of Anne of Austria and Cardinal Richelieu, bound with four engravings.
£850
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LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude.
The Tupí-Cawahíb.
Washington, United States Government Printing Office, 1948.
A set of offprints of four articles by Lévi-Strauss from the Smithsonian’s Handbook of South American Indians, inscribed by the author. In each article Claude Lévy-Strauss (1908–2009) provides an illustrated introduction to an Amazonian group, recording their history, social and political...
£300
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
Doom of Youth …
London, Chatto & Windus, 1932.
First English edition, one of Lewis’s scarcest works (only 549 copies avoided destruction). Doom of Youth began life as a series of seven articles on youth politics in Time and Tide in June–July 1931, rounded off with a pair by G.K. Chesterton; it was expanded and first published...
£2000
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
The Old Gang and the New Gang.
London, Desmond Harmsworth, 1933.
First edition, binding variant (1), a work on ‘youth cults’ and the rise of European dictatorships. Bridson’s review was not especially complimentary, noting ‘that peculiar “kiddish” idiom which Mr. Lewis uses to advantage in his satiric novels and to little purpose elsewhere … We can excuse...
£250
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
Left Wings Over Europe: or, how to make a War about Nothing.
London, Jonathan Cape, [1936].
First edition, first printing, a reiteration of the delusions about Hitler that Lewis had first presented in Hitler (1931), alongside a rejection of the Internationalism he had argued so firmly for in The Art of Being Ruled and would later espouse once more. Lewis afterwards dismissed the...
£500
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
The Jews, are they human?
London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, [1939]
First edition, Lewis’s first avowedly antifascist text, an argument against antisemitism written after the first draft of The Hitler Cult but published nine months earlier. Lewis had visited Germany, and the Warsaw Ghetto, in 1938, and had been left disturbed. ‘Perhaps because he had come...
£450
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
America and Cosmic Man.
London and Brussels, Nicholas and Watson Ltd., [1948].
First edition, second state binding as always (the first, in green cloth, was rejected by Lewis as ‘hideous’ and was used on only 3 trial copies). In hand by 1943, not finished until 1946 and then rejected by American publishers until it finally found a British home in 1948, America and Cosmic Man...
£200
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
Rude Assignment. A Narrative of my Career up-to-date … Illustrated with works by the Author.
London, Hutchinson & Co., [1950].
First edition, first impression, ‘one of the most readable of his later works ... also one of the most illuminating’ (Bridson, Filibuster).
£275
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
One-Way Song. With a Foreword by T. S. Eliot.
London, Methuen, [1960].
Second edition, ostensibly an unaltered reprint of the first edition of 1933, but in fact with some changes. Eliot’s foreword is new to this edition. Bridson had reviewed the original edition uncharitably as ‘versified pamphleteering’ in Poetry XLV: 3 (Dec 1934), accusing it of being a satirical...
£150
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LEWIS, Wyndham.
The Lion and the Fox. The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare …
London, Methuen & Co. Ltd., [1955.]
Reprint of the second edition of Lewis’s ‘first political book’, a collection of essays engaging with Shakespeare and Machiavelli first published in 1927 and then reissued by Methuen in 1951; inscribed in a very shaky hand ‘To Geoffrey Bridson from Wyndham / Oct 1956’.
£300
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LIEBER, Francis.
Autograph letter in French, signed ‘François Lieber’, to Joseph Bonaparte, comte de Survilliers, Napoleon’s...
Columbia, South Carolina, 9 May 1836.
The German-American political scientist Francis Lieber (1800–1872) was a prolific theorist of political ethics and jurisprudence. He emigrated to Boston in 1827, where he impressed John Quincy Adams, and became Tocqueville’s principal informant for Democracy in America (1835–40). In 1835 he was...
£425
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LIEBIG, Justus von.
Autograph letter, signed, to an unnamed English nobleman.
Munich, 10 December 1857.
A fine letter from Justus von Liebig to an unnamed English nobleman.
£1250
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LIST, Friedrich.
Das nationale System der politischen Oekonomie … Erster Band: Der internationale Handel, die Handelspolitik...
Stuttgart, J.G. Cotta, 1841.
First edition, the first work to articulate developing economies’ need for protective regulation, one of the earliest and most severe critiques of Adam Smith and his followers.
£12000
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LIVY, Titus.
T. Livii Patauini […] ex XIIII Decadibus Historiae Romanae ab Urbe condita, Decades, prima, tertia, quarta,...
Paris, [Michel Vascosan for] Oudin Petit, 1543 [– Michel Vascosan for himself and Oudin Petit, 1542].
A much-praised edition of Livy’s History, reprinting Vascosan’s 1535 edition and including the philological corpus on Livy by the most established humanists of the time: Rhenanus, Gelenius, Grynaeus, Glareanus, Badius Ascensius, Valla, and Sabellico.
£3800
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LOCKE, John.
[An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding]. Extrait d’un Livre Anglois qui n’est pas encore publié, intitulé...
Amsterdam, Wolfgang, Waesbergi, Boom, & Van Someren, 1688.
A substantial and extremely influential extract, published two years before the appearance of the book, of Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding: a publication of major consequence in the history of philosophy. This issue of the Bibliothèque universelle et historique also...
£2850