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.

  1. [COAL].

    The miner’s journal. Coal statistical register, for 1869… also, statistics of the iron trade… rates of wages… together...

    Pottsville, PA, Miners’ Journal Office, 1869.

    First edition, rare. A synopsis of the trade, transportation and activities connected with coal between Pennsylvania and New York. The Miner’s Journal tracked the pulse of American coal trade, including importations of foreign coal and exports of domestic material. It prided itself on circulating ‘more...

    £125

  2. COMTE, Auguste.

    Cours de philosophie positive.

    Paris, Bachelier, 1830-1842.

    First edition, an attractive set, of Comte’s principal work, the outline of positivism. In the course of six volumes Comte sets out the terms of a new sociology and its status in relations to the other fields of knowledge. In fact it is in the forty-seventh lesson that the neologism ‘sociologie’...

    £1600

  3. COMTE, Auguste, and Albert CROMPTON (editor).

    Confessions and Testament of August Comte: and his correspondence with...

    Liverpool, Young, 1910.

    First edition in English of Comte’s Confessions, which first appeared with his ‘testament’ in French in 1884. These take the form of ‘Twelve Saint Clotildes’, a series of annual confessions which he recited to his muse’s grave. Clotilde de Vaux was a divorced woman whom Comte met...

    £80

  4. CONTI, Natale. 

    Mythologiæ, sive explicationis fabularum, libri decem.  In quibus omnia propè naturalis & moralis philosophiæ...

    Frankfurt, the heirs of André Wechel, 1584. 

    The Mythologiae of Natale Conti (Natalis Comes), first published Venice 1567, was a standard reference work for classical mythology in the later Renaissance, treating the corpus as allegories that syncretized ancient philosophy and could thus be decoded by the initiated reader. 

    £950

  5. [CORFU.]

    Notificazione. Uffizio della segreteria del governo. Corfu, 7 Maggio 1816 …

    Corfu, ‘en te typographia tes dioikeseos’, [1816].

    A seemingly unrecorded bilingual broadside, in parallel Italian and Greek, reporting on cases of plague in the district of Leftimo on the island of Corfu, issued during the British protectorate in May 1816 and printed in the capital at the government press.

    £375

  6. COSTER, François. 

    Piarum et Christ. institutionum libri tres, in usum sodalitatis B. Mariae Virginis primum conscripti, nunc...

    Douai, Jean Bogard, 1582. 

    Very rare Douai edition of this devotional work by the Belgian Jesuit François Coster (1532–1619), first published at Cologne in 1578, illustrated with woodcuts of the Crucifixion and Our Lady of Sorrows. 

    £675

  7. DARRÉ, G.-G.

    ‘Conferences diaconales données par Mr l’abbé Darré, Vicaire Général au GrandSéminaire d’Auch. Année...

    Auch, 1864.

    An attractively written manuscript of Abbé Darré’s practical manual for the use of young priests entering pastoral ministry, the text remaining unprinted, according to OCLC, until 1872.

    £200

  8. ÉCOLE DE MEDECINE DE MONTPELLIER.

    A collection of eighty-seven doctoral dissertations presented to and defended at the Medical...

    Montpellier, various publishers, 1800–1810.

    An extraordinary collection, bound up very soon after the last was published, of eighty-seven doctoral dissertations presented to the ancient medical school at Montpellier in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

    £1750

  9. [EDUCATION.]

    Lois et réglemens pour les lycees.

    Paris, ‘de l’imprimerie de la République, an XII,’ 1803.

    Rare first edition of this extremely interesting collection of laws and regulations governing secondary education in France, reflecting the historic changes enacted between 1801 and 1803 by Napoleon as First Consul, in particular the establishment of lycées.

    £175

  10. ERLENBACH, Jean Jacques.

    Compliment de Congé en rimes francaises, a monsieur Ziegert, sur son depart pour Halle à l’université...

    Breslau, Charles Guillaume Grass, [1754].

    Charming and apparently unrecorded poem written on the occasion of the departure for the University of Halle of an unidentified Mr Ziegert by his disgruntled friend Johan Jakob Erlenbach (who, according to a footnote, did not expect his poem to be printed).

    £150

  11. FERRI, Giovanni.

    Discours sur les principes de l’education lycéenne, prononcé à l’inauguration du Lycée d’Angers, par...

    Angers, Frères Mame, 1806.

    Only edition, rare, of this speech by the Italian writer and educationalist Giovanni Ferri de St. Constant (1755-1830), on the inauguration of the Lycée at Angers. Ferri, who had worked in France before the radicalisation of the Revolution had led to his exile in England, had returned to France with...

    £225

  12. FIELDING, Henry.

    The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling …

    Paris: Printed by Fr. Amb. Didot the eldest, and sold by J. N. Pissot, and Barrois Junior … Booksellers. 1780.

    The first French edition in English of Fielding’s masterpiece, only the second English edition to be printed abroad (after Dresden, 1774). Here the text benefits from critical attention by Didot, who collated Murphy’s edition of Fielding’s Works with the last separate English edition.

    £425

  13. [FISCHER, Friedrich Christoph Jonathan, and Pierre-Gustave BRUNET (translator)].

    Les nuits d’érpeuve des villageoises...

    Paris, Jules Gay, 1861.

    First edition in French, numbered 26 of 100 copies, of this obscure study, first published in 1780 as Über die Probenächte der teutschen Bauernmädchen (‘On the Rehearsal Nights of Teutonic Peasant Women’). Brunet’s ‘postface’ builds on the comparisons made in Fischer’s original...

    £150

  14. GASPAROLI, Carlo Maria.

    Dialectica sive manuductio ad logicam dictata a R. P. Bar. De Somere. Scripta a me Car. Mar. Gasparoli....

    Antwerp, 1753.

    A handsome manuscript comprising a thorough course in logic and dialectic, executed by a student at the Jesuit college in Antwerp, and illustrated with an extraordinary decorative programme inspired by printed emblems.

    £4750

  15. GAYOT DE PITAVAL (Conseil).

    Question d’estat: fille reclamée par deux meres.

    Paris, Nicolas le Gras, 1716.

    First edition of this account by the famous advocate François Gayot de Pitaval (1673–1743) of a 1709 case, where a midwife had substituted a new-born girl who was then claimed both by the real mother and the woman to whom the baby had been given. Pitaval’s account details the principles by...

    £350

  16. GIOJA, Melchiorre.

    Del merito e delle ricompense, trattato storico e filosofico ...

    Filadelfia, [n. p.], 1830 (vol. I); Lugano, Giuseppe Ruggia, 1830 (vol. II).

    Second edition (first published in 1818, a third followed in 1832) of this important work by the political theorist, economist, and champion of Italian unity, Gioja (1767–1829). ‘He contended in his best known work, Del merito e delle ricompense ..., which was inspired by Beccaria’s Dei delitti...

    £250

  17. GOSSELIN, Charles-Robert. 

    Plan d’éducation, en réponse aux académies de Marseille et de Châlons, dont l’une a proposé...

    Amsterdam, 1785. 

    A most interesting sammelband of three rare French works on education from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
     
    In the first work, Charles-Robert Gosselin (1740–1820) advocates a radical overhaul of the existing system of education in France through the destruction...

    £875

  18. [GOURAUD, Stéphane, known as:] GURO, Stepan Andreevich, chevalier de.

    Rech’ o deistvii prosveshcheniia na sostoianie narodov …...

    St Petersburg, Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1826.

    First edition. This early speech on the importance of higher education was delivered by the rector of the recently founded University of St Petersburg in his native French (and in a somewhat florid style, to judge from the Russian translation by Nikita Butyrsky, a fellow academic and translator of Schiller)....

    £400

  19. [GREATTI, Giuseppe.] 

    L’Educazione. Poemetto in ottava rima. 

    Padua, 1796. 

    Only edition of this poem on the theme of education, dedicated to the Paduan noblewoman Arpalice Savorgnan di Brazzà, well-known in the city for her embrace of radicals and revolutionaries, which led her salon to be known as ‘l’unione dei giacobini’ (see di Brazzà, p. 714). 

    £350

  20. GREGORY, John.

    A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters … the second Edition.

    London, W. Strahan and T. Cadell, and Edinburgh, W. Creech, 1774.

    ‘Second edition’ of Gregory’s Legacy to his Daughters, published immediately after the first. Written following the death of the author’s wife in 1761, the text was not intended for publication, rather to provide posthumous guidance for his two daughters, whom he brought up ‘in...

    £275