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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[ABC.]
Petite géographie amusante abécédaire nouveau offrant pour chaque lettre de l’alphabet une carte coloriée avec l’explication...
C. Lehuby, ‘Librairie de l’enfance et de la jeunesse’, [1851].
A charming and very rare ABC intended to teach children European geography, from A for Allemagne to Z for Zara in Dalmatia, published just a few years after the upheavals of the revolutions of 1848.
£3750
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ACTON, William.
Prostitution, considered in its moral, social, & sanitary aspects, in London and other large cities. With proposals...
London, [Savill and Edwards for] John Churchill, 1857.
First edition of this medico-social analysis of sex work and sexually transmitted infections in London, in which physician William Acton argues for increased governmental intervention, influential in shaping the later Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869.
£1250
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ADDAMS, Jane.
Twenty years at Hull-House with autobiographical notes.
New York, Macmillan, 1910.
First edition, second printing (issued in the same month and year as the first) of Jane Addams’s bestselling autobiography and account of Hull House, Chicago’s first settlement house for immigrants and the poor (the second in the United States), our copy with two autograph letters from Addams...
£650
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ADORNO, Theodor W., Else FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, Daniel J. LEVINSON, and R. Nevitt SANFORD
The Authoritarian Personality.
New York, Harper Brothers, 1950.
First edition of this groundbreaking work of social psychology on the development of prejudice by Theodor Adorno and the psychologists Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, written in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
£225
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ALTING, Jacob; Heinrich Jakob van BASHUYSEN, editor.
Compendium fundamentorum punctationis linguae sanctae. Sive grammaticae...
Hanau, Johann Georg Winsheimer ‘in Typographia Orientali’ for Johann Fernau, 1712
First and only edition, seemingly the only surviving copy, of this Hanau-printed abridgement of Alting’s Hebrew grammar (first published in 1654) by the German Hebraist Heinrich van Bashuysen, printed at Bashuysen’s own press for the use of his pupils at the local gymnasium.
£1250
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[AMERICAN EDUCATION.]
An Oration to Children by Way of Information.
[New England, c. 1800.]
An American manuscript of seemingly unrecorded devotional verses intended for children, bound reusing a child’s contemporary writing samples, a rare material witness to the early American classroom.
£1200
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[ANON.]
Le moine galant, ou la vie de Don F… Bernardin, ecrite par lui-même. [S.l., s.n.,] 1756.
[s.n.,] 1756.
Scarce first edition of this satirical ‘autobiography’ of a pleasure-driven law student-turned-monk, replete with amorous adventures.
£450
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[AQUHORTIES.]
Abstract of the Rules and Regulations for the Students in the College of Aquhorties …
Edinburgh, Printed by J. Moir, Paterson’s Court, [1799?].
Broadside rules for the newly established Aquhorties College, the only Roman Catholic college in Scotland, presumably designed to be posted up around the school.
£850
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[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
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[ART EDUCATION.]
Der kleine Maler.
[Germany, mid-nineteenth century.]
A delightful suite of plates intended to teach children painting by copying hand-coloured exemplars.
£450
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ASH, John.
Sentiments on Education, collected from the best Writers; properly methodized, and interspersed with occasional Observations.
London, Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1777.
First edition of this collection of quotations from various writers on education, interspersed with the opinions of the author, the grammarian, lexicographer, and Baptist minister John Ash.
£850
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[ATLAS.]
[Cover title:] School Atlas; or, Key to Goldsmith’s geographical Copy-Books …
London, Richard Phillips, [1810–11].
Likely first edition, very rare, of this school atlas including world maps in globe and on Mercator’s projection (in which Australia features as New Holland), showing Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the West Indies, ‘Hindoostan’, Ancient Greece,...
£475
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[AYALA Y AGUILAR, José de.]
Examen del derecho de vida y muerte, egercido por los gobiernos. Escrito por un Cubano.
Barcelona, Ignacio Estivill, 1838.
First edition of a Cuban treatise of criminal law, a forceful impugnation of capital punishment which invokes arguments and schemes from, among others, Filangieri, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Rousseau, and Bentham.
£250
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BALFOUR, Arthur James, first Earl of Balfour.
Letter, signed, to ‘Sir John’.
London, 10 Downing Street, 28 June 1901.
A letter from Arthur Balfour, as first lord of the Treasury, written a year before he was elected Prime Minister, concerning what would become perhaps his greatest achievement, the Education Act of 1902.
£300
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BALLOU, Adin.
Practical Christian Socialism: a conversational Exposition of the true System of human Society; in three Parts, viz:...
Hopedale and New York, by the author and Fowlers and Wells, 1854.
First exposition of Ballou’s most important work, an explication of the principles behind his utopian Hopedale Community, established in Milford, Massachusetts in 1841.
£450
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BARRINGTON, George.
A Voyage to Botany Bay with a Description of the Country, Manners, Customs, Religion, &c. of the Natives by...
London, C. Lowndes for H.D. Symonds, [c. 1800-1802, A1 watermarked ‘1800’].
First and only combined edition, second issue. George Barrington was a ‘genteel young Irishman known for his sartorial elegance, his command of the etiquette of romantic sensibility, and for his prowess at picking pockets’ (Garvey p. 2). The fascinating contrast between Barrington’s charming...
£875
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BEARCROFT, Philip.
An historical Account of Thomas Sutton Esq; and of his Foundation in Charter-House …
London: Printed by E. Owen, and sold by F. Gyles … W. Hinchliffe … J. and P. Knapton … J. Stagg … and S. Birt … 1737.
First edition. Thomas Sutton (1532-1611) was an Elizabethan civil servant who made an enormous fortune from leases of land rich in coal in Durham. In 1611 he bought Howard House for £13,000 from the Earl of Suffolk; the building acquired its more familiar name, ‘Charterhouse’, after the order of...
£250
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BEAUMONT, Gustave-Auguste de la Bonninière de.
Autograph letter signed (‘Gustave de Beaumont’) to Sarah Austin.
Birmingham, 27 June [1835].
A warm and personal autograph documenting the relationship between Beaumont (1802–1866), prison reformer and travel companion to Alexis de Tocqueville, and one of the most accomplished contemporary catalysts of philosophical exchange, the translator Sarah Austin.
£350
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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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[BENN, Anthony, father, and Charles Anthony BENN, son.]
NICHOLS W., MAYLAND, GROOM, J., photographers. Photographic...
Late 1850s–early 1900s.
A charming collection of photographs and newspaper cuttings spanning some fifty years, compiled by a father and son during their Cambridge days, including a letter of thanks from Trinity Hall to the son, Charles Anthony Benn, for his endowment to the college, which now funds the Benn Bursary.
£1200