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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. AUGUSTINUS TRIUMPHUS [i.e. AUGUSTINUS de Ancona]. 

    Summa de potestate ecclesiastica. 

    Augsburg, [Johann Schüssler,] 6 March 1473. 

    First edition of this highly important and influential magnum opus of political theory, a defence of papal supremacy. 

    £30000

  2. ANTONIUS de Vercellis. 

    Sermones quadragesimales de XII mirabilibus Christianae fidei excellentiis [with additions by Ludovicus...

    Venice, Johannes and Gregorius de Gregoriis, de Forlivio, [for Alexander Calcedonius], 16 February 1492/93. 

    A remarkable copy of the first edition of Antonius de Vercellis’ sermons, owned and annotated by three contemporary Franciscans, one of whom, Andrea Alamanni, may be the confessor who administered Machiavelli’s last rites. 

    £8500

  3. PETRARCH, Francesco. 

    Librorum Francisci Petrarche impressorum annotatio.  De ignorantia suiipsius et multorum liber I.  De...

    Venice, Simone da Luere for Andreas Torresanus de Asula, 27 March 1501. 

    Part one of the second collected edition of Petrarch’s Latin works (first Basel 1496), owned and annotated by the great Italian naturalist and physician Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605). 

    £16000

  4. PONTANO, Giovanni.

    De rebus coelestibus.

    Naples, ‘ex officina Sigismundi Mayr Germani : summo ingenio artificis Ioannetto Salodio : Antonio Vuerengrundt : Evangelista Papiensi :...

    First editions of three works on cosmology, ethics, and astrology by the Neapolitan humanist, poet, and polymath Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), an important sammelband from the celebrated library of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), professor of natural philosophy and natural history at the University...

    £12500

  5. THOMAS AQUINAS. 

    Secunda secunde sancti Thome de Aq[ui]no ordinis predicato[rum] novissime recognita, q[uam]pluribusq[ue] utilissimis...

    [Venice, printed by Giorgio Arrivabene for Ottaviano Scoto, 30 September 1513 (colophon).] 

    Two very rare post-incunables: early Venetian editions, gathered together in their first binding, of the Secunda Secundae and the Tertia parts of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, arguably the most pervasively influential philosophico-theological work of the Middle Ages. 

    £7000

  6. SENECA, Lucius Annaeus (attr.). 

    Liber ad Gallione[m] de remediis fortuitorum. 

    [Leipzig, Jacobus Thanner, 1517.] 

    An extensively annotated copy of a very rare early sixteenth-century edition of this successful tract of moral philosophy.  Whilst its entire manuscript tradition was unanimous in attributing this work to Seneca, and eminent scholars with a profoundly intimate knowledge of Senecan philosophy...

    £4500

  7. ERASMUS, Desiderius. 

    Paraclesis, id est adhortio ad sanctissimum ac saluberrimum Cristianae philosophiae studium … 

    Basel, Johann Froben, February 1520. 

    Attractive contemporary Erasmus sammelband, superbly eloquent in its physical union of three treatises without which the humanist’s Praise of Folly would risk gross misinterpretation. 

    £5500

  8. SENECA, Lucius Annaeus. 

    L. Annei Senecae opera, et ad dicendi facultatem, et ad bene vivendu[m] utilissima, per Des. Erasmum...

    Basel, ‘in officina Frobeniana’, 1529 [(colophon:) Basel, Johann Herwagen, March 1537]. 

    Second Erasmus edition of the moral essays and letters of Seneca, owned and annotated by Ludovicus Carinus (d. 1569), friend and later foe of Erasmus himself. 

    £6000

  9. [MELANCHTHON, Philipp.] 

    LAGUS, Konrad.  Oratio de Platone. 

    Wittenberg, [J. Klug], 1538. 

    Only edition, exceedingly rare (one copy only in the US), of the main extant source for Melanchthon’s views on Plato.  ‘Melanchthon’s view of Plato is known primarily from a Latin speech, which he asked Conrad Lagus to deliver’ (Hartfelder). 

    £3500

  10. XENOPHON, and Lodovico DOMENICHI (translator). 

    L’opere morali di Xenophonte tradotte per M. Lodovico Domenichi. 

    Venice, Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1547. 

    First edition of the translation of the moral works of Xenophon by the Italian poet and writer Lodovico Domenichi (1515–1564), containing the first Italian versions of the Spartan Polity and Agesilaus, and of the Socratic dialogues, the Memorabilia, Apologia, Hiero,...

    £500

  11. POSTEL, Guillaume.

    De originibus, seu, de varia et potissimum orbi Latino ad hanc diem incognita, aut inconsyderata historia, quorum...

    Basle, Johannes Oporinus, [1553].

    First edition of Postel’s investigations into the original language as a means to regain the primordial unity of mankind.

    £3500

  12. BALDUINO, Girolamo.

    Quaesitum novum pulcherrimum, ac optatissimum contra Scotum, ac communem viam in quo enucleatur an de subiecto...

    Naples, Raymundus Amatus, 1557.

    Scarce first editions of two early works on Aristotelian logic by Girolamo Balduino, an important member of the Paduan school of Aristotelian commentators who have been recognised in recent scholarship as a crucial link between traditional logic and science and the new, Galilean methodologies....

    £1250

  13. RIDOLFI, Luca Antonio. 

    Aretefila, dialogo, nel quale da una parte sono quelle ragioni allegate, le quali affermano, lo amore...

    Lyons, Guillaume Rouillé, 1562. 

    Annotated copy, once owned by a music book collector, of the third edition (first 1557) of a remarkable Renaissance philosophical dialogue on the nature of love which marked the culmination of the very divisive ‘questione d’amore’ hotly debated in sixteenth-century literature. 

    £2800

  14. GROUCHY, Nicolas de.

    Praeceptiones dialecticae, Nicolao Gruchio Rotomagensi authore. Disputatio eiusdem, quid de nomine dialectices...

    Paris, Gabriel Buon, 1563.

    Grouchy’s abstract of his lectures on logic and Aristotelian dialectic. Grouchy spent 12 years in Bordeaux (1535-47) as professor of rhetoric at the Collège de Guyenne (the top class was called “Classe de Rhétorique”), and his book became part of the Collège’s published syllabus for the two-year...

    £750

  15. DOLCE, Lodovico.

    Somma della filosofia a’Aristotele, e prima della dialettica. [with:] Somma di tutta la natural filosofia di...

    Venice, Giovanni Battista, & Marchio Sessa, & fratelli, [1565].

    First edition of this exposition of Aristotle’s dialaectics, moral, and natural philosophy by ‘one of the major transmitters of culture in cinquecento Italy’ (Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters, 1997).

    £5500

  16. DIOGENES LAERTIUS, [and Henri ESTIENNE (editor)].

    Περι βίων, δογμάτων και αποφθεγμων...

    [Geneva,] Henri Estienne, 1570.

    First Estienne edition of The Lives of the Philosophers, a very important edition in the original Greek, ‘in which appear for the first time many passages discovered in manuscripts by Estienne’. ‘The volume also contains thirty-six pages of important textual annotations by Henri Estienne,...

    £1400

  17. CHRYSOSTOM, John. 

    [Opera: Homeliae.]  Que in secundo Ioannis Chrisostomi volumine continentur: Super Mattheum homelie 89 …...

    Venice, Stagnino & de Gregoriis, 1503. 

    First edition of Chrysostom’s Opera omnia, the second volume (of two), annotated throughout by two critical readers. 

    £2800

  18. [ARISTOTLE.] 

    Disputations on Aristotle’s Organon. 

    Milan, 1600-1601. 

    An interesting manuscript comprising disputations on the first four works of Aristotle’s Organon, covering logical analysis and dialectic, compiled by a Milanese student at the turn of the seventeenth century. 

    £1250

  19. BACON, Francis. 

    Francisci Baconi, Baronis de Verulamio, Vice-Comitis Sancti Albani, operum moralium et civilium tomus … cura...

    London, Edward Griffin [and John Haviland] for Richard Whitaker [and John Norton], 1638. 

    First edition, first issue, a copy from the celebrated Albani library: tangible witness to the early and fecund reception of Bacon’s thought in the circles of Galilean science in Italy. 

    £3500

  20. JOHN OF SALISBURY. 

    Policraticus, sive de nugis curialium, et vestigiis philosophorum, libri octo.  Accedit huic editioni eiusdem...

    Leiden, Joannes Maire, 1639. 

    Attractive Maire edition of the two principal works of the twelfth-century scholar, diplomat, and bishop of Chartres, John of Salisbury, both completed by 1159 and dedicated to Thomas Becket. 

    £600