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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HEXHAM, Henry.
A Tongue-Combat, lately happening betweene two English Souldiers in the Tilt-boat of Gravesend, the one going...
Printed at London [i.e. Holland]. 1623.
First edition, written in reply to a rare pamphlet with a near-identical title by Richard Verstegan [or Rowlands], an intelligence agent in the Netherlands for the English Jesuits. Verstegan’s original Toung-Combat comprised a dialogue between the pro-Catholic Red Scarf and the Protestant...
£1650
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HIEROCLES of Alexandria.
Ύπομνηνα εις τα των Πυθαγορειων επη τα χρυσα … commentarius in...
London, J. R. [John Redmayne] for J. Williams, and Henry Dickinson, Cambridge, 1673.
London edition of the only complete work of Hierocles, his commentaries on the Golden Verses, a valuable epitome of Pythagorean ethical teachings, printed here in the original and in a Latin translation. According to tradition they were put into their present form by Lysis, one of the most...
£500
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HIRSCH, William.
Genius and Degeneration. A Psychological Study.
New York, Appleton, 1896.
First edition in English, translated from the second edition of the German original, Genie und Entartung (1895).
£150
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HODSON, Thomas.
The Accomplished Tutor; or, complete System of liberal Education … Embellished with twenty Copper-plates and...
London, H. D. Symonds, and Vernor and Hood, 1802.
Second edition, revised, of a voluminous catch-all schoolbook (first published 1800), by Thomas Hodson, of the Middle Temple.
£300
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HOLLANDER, Jacob Harry.
Economic Liberalism.
New York and Cincinnati, The Abingdon Press, [1925].
First edition, dedicated ‘to the memory of Herbert B. Adams, who first taught me the meaning of liberalism’.
£50
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HOLLAR, Wenceslaus, attributed.
[Portraits of celebrated Courtezans.]
Nineteenth century?
A famous series of portraits depicting Restoration-era London courtesans, long attributed to Hollar, but that attribution rejected by Pennington and New Hollstein.
£1200
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HOPKINS, William.
Address delivered at the Hull Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, September...
London, Taylor & Francis, 1853.
First edition, an 1853 Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science by its President William Hopkins (1793–1866), inscribed by the author and given to his erstwhile student Francis Galton (1822–1911). A mathematician and geologist, Hopkins became President of the British...
£350
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[HOSPICE SAINT-NICOLAS, METZ.]
Deed granting land to the hospice.
Metz, 5 May 1464.
A significant document recording the grant of agricultural land in 1464 to the Hospice of Saint-Nicolas, the oldest hospital in Metz, in northeast France, issued during the reign of Louis XI and in the final year of the papacy of Pius II.
£450
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[HÖSS,] Maria Crescentia, Saint.
‘Wahre Abbildung der From[m]en Schwester Maria Crescentia des Heilige[n] Ordens S. Francisci,...
Jahr ihres Alters.’ Mindelheim, Lingauer, 1744.
Extremely rare devotional engraving of Maria Crescentia Höss, a mystic and sister of the Third Order Regular of St Francis at the Franciscan convent in Kaufbeuren, Bavaria, issued shortly after her death at the nearby town of Mindelheim.
£750
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HUISH, Robert.
Fatherless Rosa; or, the Dangers of the Female Life. Expressly written as a Companion to Fatherless Fanny …
London, Published by T. Kaygill … for William Emans …, 1820.
First edition. Like the best-selling Fatherless Fanny (1811, possibly by Clara Reeve), Fatherless Rosa, set in the middle of the eighteenth century, pleads ‘the cause of virtue and morality’, but with characters exhibiting ‘a greater degree of vice’ than Fanny, the little...
£750
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HUME, David, [and Octavie BELOT, translator].
Histoire de la maison de Tudor sur le trône d’Angleterre … traduit...
Amsterdam [i.e. Paris], 1763.
A very fine set of the first French edition of Hume’s history of Tudor England, translated by the Parisian widow Octavie Belot (1719–1805, née Guichard), who supported herself with income from her translations, and through her work developed a friendship with Hume.
£600
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‘HURLBUT’ [i.e. HURLBERT], William Henry.
Pictures of Cuba.
London: M’Corquodale and Co. for Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1855.
First British edition, revised and retitled, issued in the ‘Traveller’s Library’ series. Pictures of Cuba was first published under the title Gan-Eden: or, Pictures of Cuba (Boston: 1854), and Hurlbert (1827-1895) states in his preface that, ‘In the short time that has elapsed...
£150
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HURRY, Thomas.
Tables of interest, from one pound to five hundred millions, for one day; by which the interest for any sum of money...
[Yarmouth], Printed for the author, and sold by Messrs. Robinson, London; and Downes and March, Yarmouth, 1786.
One of two editions published in 1786, the other one undated, ESTC does not give any precedence. Tables for calculating interest at a quarter, half, three-quarters, three, four, and five percent; intended as a quick reference for bankers and merchants. Hurry precedes his tables with four pages of example...
£150
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HYGINUS Gromaticus, attributed, and POLYBIUS.
De Castris Romanis, quae extant. Cum notis & animadversionibus …
Amsterdam, Jodocus Pluymer, 1660.
First edition thus, with annotations by the politician Radboud Herman Scheele (1622–1662).
£1000
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[‘HYSON, Timothy’, pseud. Thomas LOWNDES].
A Letter to Mr. Richard Twining, Tea Dealer, and One of the Candidates for...
London, [C. Roworth] for the author, 1827.
Second edition of the Letter to Mr Richard Twining, a public denunciation of the candidacy of the tea merchant Richard Twining (1749-1824) for a directorship of the East India Company in 1810. Twining, who had already been instrumental in the development of tea prices and taxation for many...
£250
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INCHBALD, Mrs. [Elizabeth.]
Nature and Art.
London, G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796.
First edition of a powerful and tragic Jacobin novel, ‘remarkable for its dramatic rendering of the feminist point that men destroy women’s chastity and then mete out punishment for its loss’ (Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 1986). It is a fearless interrogation of hypocrisy,...
£3250
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[INDUSTRIOUS POOR, Charitable Corporation for the Relief of.]
The present state of the unhappy sufferers of the Charitable Corporation...
London, [n.p.], 1733.
First and only edition of an anonymous plea to Parliament for the rescue of the Charitable Corporation for the Relief of the Industrious Poor, a pawnbroker which granted credit at low interest to the ‘deserving poor’ who left a pledge. Founded in 1707, in the 1720s the Corporation came under scrutiny...
£250
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[INTERSEX.]
Three pamphlets.
Paris, 1892–1920.
A collection of rare French pamphlets on the subject of differences in sex development from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two of the three pamphlets are doctoral theses, covering the social impact of differences in sex development, and persistent müllerian duct syndrome (‘tubular...
£450
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IRWIN, Eyles.
The Triumph of Innocence; an Ode. Written on the Deliverance of Maria Theresa Charlotte, Princess Royal of France,...
London, W. Bulmer for G. Nicol, 1796.
First and only edition, very rare, of this anti-Jacobin poem celebrating the release of Marie Thérèse of France (1778–1851), eldest child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, from the Temple prison, where she had been held since 1792 as the rest of her family were gradually removed and executed.
£800
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[ISELIN, Isaak].
Träume eines Menschenfreundes. Erster Theil.
Basel, Johannes Schweighauser, 1776.
Uncommon first edition, part one only (very rarely to be found complete with both parts), of the most mature expression of Iselin’s anti-Rousseau republicanism, a social ‘dream’ of great articulation and – arguably – applicability, residing confidently on the borderline between utopia and...
£150