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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. [ISELIN, ISAAK].

    Träume eines Menschenfreundes. Erster Theil.

    Basel, Johannes Schweighauser, 1776.

    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 reformism, and the...

    £150

  2. [ISELIN, Isaak]. [WANDALL, Peder Topp trans.]

    Philosophiske og Patriotiske Drømme af en Menneskeven. Oversatte af Peder Topp Wandall.

    Copenhagen, Aug. Frid. Stein, 1774.

    First Danish edition of Iselin’s earliest work, the very successful Filosofische und patriotische Träume. First published in 1755, a couple of years after his deeply affecting journey to France, having met among others Rousseau, Fontenelle and Buffon. His reformist version of utopia, a response to...

    £250

  3. [ISLE OF WIGHT].

    By-laws for the regulation and government of the Poor, in the House of Industry, in the Isle of Wight.

    Newport, J. Mallett, 1789.

    First edition thus of a rare survival (two other copies known), documenting the transition from the Poor Relief Act of 1662 to the New Poor Law. The Isle of Wight was granted a licence to manage a House of Industry in 1771. This book of its by-laws consequently reflects the growing belief that the poor...

    £1250

  4. JACOBS, H. W.

    Betterment Briefs. A Collection of Published Papers on Organized Industrial Efficiency.

    New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1909.

    Second, definitive edition. ‘The nucleus of the present volume is a series of four articles published by Mr Jacobs in The Engineering Magazine from September, 1906, to January, 1907, under the title “Organization and Economy in the Railway Machine Shop”. This was followed in June by a paper on...

    £220

  5. JACOB, William.

    Report on the Trade in Foreign Corn, and on the Agriculture of the north of Europe … To which is added, an Appendix...

    London, James Ridgway, 1826.

    First edition; two further editions were published the same year. William Jacob (1762?–1851) was appointed to the comptrollership of corn returns in 1822. ‘He was commissioned by the Government in 1825 and 1827 to report on the condition of agriculture in some of the states of northern Europe; the...

    £220

  6. JEFFERIES, Richard.

    Hodge and his Masters …

    London, Smith, Elder, & Co. … 1880.

    First edition, an influential volume of sketches of rural life, collected from Jefferies’ articles in the Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Standard. Jefferies (1848-1887) had published his first novel The Scarlet Shawl in 1874, after some years as a rural newspaperman; with Hodge and his Masters...

    £450

  7. JEROME, Jerome Klapka.

    Autograph letter, signed, to W. B. Forster Bovill.

    Brussels, Wiltcher’s Hotel, 11 May 1904.

    A very good letter in which Jerome K. Jerome expresses his great admiration for the South African novelist and suffragist Olive Schreiner (1855–1920).

    £500

  8. JEVONS, William Stanley.

    Studies in deductive logic. A manual for students.

    London, Macmillan and Co., 1880.

    First edition. Jevons had been preoccupied with speculations into the science of logic from the early 1860s. In his work Elementary lessons in logic (1870), he had sought to give a clear notion of the results to which the discoveries of Boole and his predecessors necessarily led. The present work consists...

    £175

  9. JEVONS, William Stanley.

    ‘Preliminary account of certain logical inventions’, communicated March 19th, 1866 [in: Proceedings...

    London, Longman …, Liverpool, Marples, 1867.

    First edition of the account of Jevons’ communication on the ‘logical abacus’ and the ‘logical machine’, a precursor of his later ‘logical piano’. Jevons had experimented with different forms of teaching aids before creating his logical piano. On this occasion, early in his career, Jevons...

    £350

  10. JEVONS, William Stanley.

    La moneta ed il meccanismo dello scambio.

    Milan, Fratelli Dumolard, 1876.

    First Italian edition of ‘a most readable volume’ (DNB), written quite late in Jevons’s life and published in English the previous year as part of The International Scientific Series. ‘In preparing this volume, I have attempted to write a descriptive essay on the past and present monetary systems...

    £50

  11. 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

  12. JOHNSON, Alvin Saunders.

    Rent in modern economic theory: an essay in distribution.

    Columbia University, 1903.

    First edition of Johnson's doctoral dissertation. This work ‘showed unusual skill in solving problems by the dexterous use of classification. Many thinkers, he said were impressed by economic developments which seemed to foretell a new monopolistic order of society. Actually, competition had simply...

    £80

  13. [JOHNSON, Richard.]

    The History of France, from the earliest Period, comprehending every interesting and remarkable Occurrence...

    London, E. Newbery, 1792.

    Second edition of this history of France for children, revised from the first edition of 1786 to include the events of the French Revolution.

    £300

  14. JUSSIEU, Laurent Pierre de.

    Antoine et Maurice. Ouvrage qui a obtenu le prix proposé par la Société Royale pour l’amélioration...

    Paris, L. Colas, 1821.

    First edition, rare, of this unsurprisingly moralising novel by the writer, geologist, and natural historian Laurent Pierre de Jussieu (1792-1866), written in response to a competition held by the Royal Society of the Improvement of Prisons to find the best book to circulate amongst inmates.

    £250

  15. JUSTINUS, Marcus Junianius, and Lucius FLORUS. 

    [Epitome historiarum:] Justini historici clarissimi in Trogi Pompei historias...

    [Venice, Bartolomeo Zani, 3 February 1503]. 

    A thoroughly annotated copy of a greatly influential compendium of Trogus’s monumental forty-four-book Historia of the world from Babylon to the Augustan era. 

    £3800

  16. [JUVENILE.]

    A Token of Remembrance from a Mother to her absent Children, comprising simple Tales, Dialogues, and easy Poetry, adapted...

    London, William Darton, 58, Holborn Hill, 1822.

    First edition of this collection of moral tales and poetry for children, compiled by a mother for her young daughter, from the lending library of the newly established Coast Guard.

    £350

  17. [JUVENILE.] 

    Preliminary lessons on the history of England, originally compiled for private use, and now adapted to the junior...

    Taunton, J. Poole, 1821. 

    Later edition of this uncommon Taunton-printed sketch of English history for use in primary schools, which first appeared in 1809.  After brief notes on Julius Caesar, the Saxons, and notable pre-Conquest kings, the book offers a short overview of the character of each monarch (and monarch substitute)...

    £135

  18. [JUVENILE.]

    [Library for Youth, or Book-Case of Knowledge, 10 vols.]

    London: Printed for John Wallis … by T. Gillet or J. Cundee … 1800.

    A fine complete set of Wallis’s ‘Library for Youth’ also known as the ‘Book-Case of Knowledge’, with all ten volumes in the first editions, dated 1800, and with two original designs (in reverse) for the frontispieces.

    £4750

  19. [KAMES, Henry HOME, Lord].

    Grundsaetze der Kritik, aus dem Englischen übersetzt, von Joh. Nikolaus Meinhard.

    Vienna, Johann Thomas Edlen von Trattnern, 1785-6.

    A Viennese reprint of the first German translation of the Elements of criticism, by Meinhard with the approval of Lessing, first issued in 1763-66, instrumental in the dissemination and reception of Kames’s aesthetic theories in Germany and a seminal publication in the formation of pre-Romantic aesthetics.

    £250

  20. KANT, Immanuel.

    Kritika chistago razuma …

    St Petersburg, M.V. Popov, 1902.

    Third Russian edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, first published in German in 1781, and in Russian in 1867, in the translation by N. Sokolov which had first appeared in 1897.

    £450