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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BEDE, the Venerable, Saint.
Bedae presbyteri Anglosaxonis, monachi benedicti, viri literatissimi opuscula cumplura...
Cologne, Johannes Prael for Peter Quentel, May 1537.
First illustrated edition (second overall) of Bede’s two principal scientific and computistical works De natura rerum and De temporum ratione, with commentary by the Dutch scholar Joannes Noviomagus (1494-1570), a very good copy in an attractive French binding.
£3750
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[BEER.]
Jenaischer allgemeiner Bier-Comment nebst angehängtem Bier-Prozess.
‘Eschwig, Otter & Kunitz, 183*.’
An apparently unrecorded humorous handbook of drinking rules for students at the university of Jena, famous both as a centre of German idealism and Romanticism, and for its professors, who included Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, and Schlegel.
£375
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[BEER, Johann Christoph.]
Kurtzer Entwurff dess Lebens der Könige in Engelland von der Zeit an als die Sachsen und Angeln sich...
Nuremberg, Johann Hoffmann, 1676.
Second, corrected and improved, edition (first 1671) of this attractive German survey of English kings and queens. After describing the rulers in the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England (Wessex, Sussex, Essex, Kent, East Anglia, Northumbria, and Mercia), Beer discusses the kings from Egbert to Harold...
£400
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BELLEGARDE, J.
B. Morvan de. Reflexions sur ce qui peut plaire ou deplaire dans le commerce du monde ... Seconde édition, revue...
Amsterdam, Héritiers d’Antoine Schelte, 1699.
Second, corrected edition of this philosophical and moral treatise. Two printings of this second edition appeared in 1699, one in Paris and this one in Amsterdam.
£200
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BELLONI, Girolami, Marchese.
Del Commercio dissertazione.
Rome, Niccolo and Marco Pagliarini, 1757.
Second edition to be authorized by Belloni, (first, 1750) – the first edition to include the author’s considerations on ‘imaginary money’ (pp. 135-154) – of a work notable for its argument in favour of restrictions on the export of money by the Vatican banker Girolamo Belloni (1688–1760)....
£300
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[BENDISCIOLI, Faustino.]
Quadro ossia saggio epilogato del Sistema di liberta’ proclamato dai Francesi.
Milan, Stamperia [dei Patrioti d’Italia] di Strada Nuova, [1799].
An impassioned tract attacking the claims of a new life of liberty promoted in Europe after the French Revolution, very rarely to be found in any of the three editions published in the same year.
£200
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BENTHAM, Jeremy.
“Swear not at all:” containing an Exposure of the Needlessness and Mischievousness, as well as Antichristianity,...
London, R. Hunter, 1817.
First published edition, originally printed in 1813 and ‘written to expose the mischief arising from the laws relating to the administration of oaths’ (Atkinson, Jeremy Bentham: his life and work, p. 173). ‘In some cases, so he declared, the Promissory Oath prevented a man from doing what he knew...
£550
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BENTHAM, Jeremy.
The Elements of the Art of Packing, as applied to Special Juries, particularly in cases of libel law.
London, Effingham Wilson, 1821.
First published edition, originally printed in 1810, of Bentham’s criticism of English libel law, which he had always detested and which more than once stood in the way of the free publication of his opinions. When the work was written, the law’s injustice had recently been made obvious in a series...
£900
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BENTHAM, Jeremy.
Plan of Parliamentary Reform, in the Form of a Catechism, with Reasons for each Article. With an Introduction,...
London: Printed in the Year 1817. Re-printed and Re-published, with Notes and Alterations, by Permission of the Author, by T. J. Wooler … 1818.
First edition thus of an inexpensive reprint of Bentham’s Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817), the style adapted by Thomas Wooler, with Bentham’s permission, to ‘render it more easy of comprehension to the popular reader’. In this form it first appeared in instalments in Wooler’s radical...
£225
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BENTHAM, Jeremy. SALAS Y CORTES, Ramón (translator).
Tratados de legislación civil y penal, obra extractada de los manuscritos...
Madrid, Fermín Villalpando, 1821-1822.
A very good copy of this Spanish translation of Bentham’s penal writings, translated from the second French edition of 1820, with an additional commentary, by the Spanish jurist and rector of Salamanca University, Salas y Cortés (1753–1837). This collection was first prepared and published...
£2250
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BENTHAM, William, barrister and numismatist.
Autograph letter to the bookseller Lackington.
Upper Gower Street [London], 25 August 1819.
Writing in the third person, Bentham requests that he be sent the ‘Supplemt of Mr Ruding’s Coins intended for the purchasers of the quarto edn’. Rogers Ruding (1751-1820) published his Annals of the Coinage, a chronological account of English coinage, in four quarto volumes in 1817. It sold out...
£100
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[BERINGTON, Simon, adapted by Jean-Baptiste DUPUY-DEMPORTES.]
Memoires de Gaudence de Luques, prisonnier de l’Inquisition...
Amsterdam and Leipzig, Arkstée & Merkus, 1754.
Second edition of this much expanded and altered translation of Berington’s celebrated utopian novel, Memoirs of Sigr Gaudentio di Lucca (1737). The Memoirs enjoyed immense popularity, undergoing at least twelve eighteenth-century editions in English and contemporary translations...
£650
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BERKELEY, George.
St Petersburg, O. N. Popov, 1905.
First Russian edition of George Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, translated by E. Dobolsky and edited by N.G. Dobolsky. The text, on the chief causes of error and difficulty in the sciences, examining the grounds of scepticism, atheism and irreligion, was first published in Dublin in 1710,...
£1750
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BERLIN Isiah.
The Naiveté of Verdi.
[New York, The Hudson Review, 1968].
First edition. Presentations by Berlin are rare, and this one is presumed to be for one of his closest friends, Stephen Spender. Spender had dedicated his World within World (1951) to Berlin, and this inscription most probably refers to Berlin’s forthcoming Four Essays on Liberty (1969) dedicated to...
£750
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BERRYAT, Jean, et al., editors.
Receuil de Mémoires, ou Collection de Pièces Académiques, concernant la Médicine, l’Anatomie...
Dijon, Auxerre, Paris and Liège, F. Desventes, F. Fournier, et al., 1754-86.
The scarce first collected edition of these scientific papers from all over Europe (lacking only the last five volumes of the Partie Française), including among its contributors such famous names as Huygens, Leeuwenhoek, Hevelius, De La Hire, Mariotte, Réaumur, La Condamine, Haller, Maupertuis, Boyle,...
£6000
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[BERRY, Robert.]
Scots Law: manuscript lecture notes from the University of Glasgow.
Glasgow, 1877-8.
A very comprehensive and legible set of manuscript notes from the lectures on Scots law given at Glasgow in the Martinmas and Candlemas terms of the academic year 1877-8 by Robert Berry (1825–1903), Regius Professor of Law at the University from 1867 to 1887. The course of study was an intensive...
£400
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BEVERIDGE, William Henry.
Full employment in a free society: a report ...
London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, [1944].
First edition of the second report by the social reformer and economist W. H. Beveridge (1879-1963), a sequel to the epoch-making Beveridge report on Social Insurance and Allied Services made to the Government in December 1942. Beveridge had earlier published Unemployment: a Problem of Industry (1909),...
£250
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BEVER, Thomas.
The History of the legal polity of the Roman State; and of the rise, progress, and extent of the Roman laws.
London, Strahan and Cadell, 1781.
Sole edition of a legal history conceived along the lines of Gibbon’s history, an account that was meant to furnish leaders of the emerging British Empire with a helpful knowledge of the past from the perspective of the evolution of legal systems.
£1500
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[BIANCHI, Isidoro.]
Compendio della vita e miracoli della B. Elisabetta Picenardi del Terz’Ordine de’ Servi di M.V. E del culto...
Cremona, per il Feraboli, 1805.
Second edition (first Rome 1804) of this account of the life and miracles of Elisabetta Picenardi (1428–1468) of the Servite Order, who was beatified in November 1804 after Pope Pius VII issued confirmation of her local cultus. The work is attributed to the Camaldolese monk Isidoro Bianchi (1731–1808)....
£350
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BIRKETT, Dorothy Nina Forbes (editor).
Hunting Lays and Hunting Ways: An Anthology of the Chase … with fourteen Illustrations...
London, John Lane at the Bodley Head, 1924.
First edition of Lady Birkett’s collection of poetry and prose relating to fox-hunting, handsomely printed and generously illustrated.
£75