Search Results: Authors starting with E from Peter Harrington

London: printed by E[van]. T[yler]. and R[alph]. H[olt]. for Nath. Brooke; printed by J. Macock for Walter Kettilby,, 1672 & 1673. Both parts of Eachard's satiric rejection of Hobbes First editions of both the first and second part of the English Divine and Satirist John Eachard's witty refutation of Hobbes's philosophy, in the form of a dialogue between a thinly-veiled Hobbes and Eachard. "Philautus (Hobbes) is a megalomaniac know-all afflicted by the fear and selfishness Hobbes saw in human nature. Timothy, by contrast, has intelligence, common sense, and good humour. The colloquial language of both speakers makes the discussion lively and concrete - the same technique as employed in Contempt of the Clergy. Dryden, in his 'Life of Lucian', ranks Eachard with Erasmus and Fontenelle as modern exponents of the Lucianic dialogue: by this method, Dryden writes, he 'has more baffled the Philosopher of Malmsbury, than those who assaulted him with the blunt, heavy Arguments, drawn from Orthodox Divinity'.… Read More

Nara: Saidai Temple,, [c.1315]. The effervescence of Japanese Buddhism during the Kamakura period An extraordinary survival, from the Hawley library, of East Asia's transnational history, bringing together a foundational Chinese sutra and a leading Korean exegesis in a Japanese context. This is an example of the printing undertaken at the famous Saidai Temple in Nara at the close of Japan's Kamakura period (1183-1333). During the late 12th and early 13th centuries, the temple printed a number of now exceptionally rare religious texts. "It was in the Kamakura period that Buddhism in Japan came into full flower" (Kazuo & Dobbinst). Composed in China around 420, the Brahma's Net Sutra (Brahmajala Sutra) is based on Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhist teachings and incorporates important Chinese moral and ethical ideas such as filial piety. The present commentary composed by the Korean monk Taehyon in the eighth century remains "the most thorough and balanced exegesis ever written on the text" (Muller, p.… Read More

Korea: Liangzhe zhuanyunsi,, [c.1087]. Korean woodblock printing of the 11th century An exceptionally rare and well-preserved 11th-century testament to the vital role of print in spreading Buddhist thought throughout East Asia. This fascicle, from a major Chinese-language critical edition of the Flower Garland Sutra (Huayan Buddhism's foundational text), was printed in Korea from blocks engraved in Hangzhou, China. Collections of different fascicles are found institutionally in East Asia; this is the only example traced in commerce in the West. Following the arrival of Buddhism in China in the first century CE, practitioners innovated a number of Sinicized traditions including the Huayan school, one of the "most philosophically interesting and historically influential Buddhist schools" (Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy). Its leading text, the Flower Garland Sutra (Avatamsakasutra), "presents a dizzyingly complex and intricate vision of reality as thoroughly 'interpenetrating', of Buddhahood as… Read More

Lima: Tipografia de Aurelio Alfaro,, 1863. Uncommon history of Lima's seismic activity First edition and only edition of this history of Lima's seismic activity since the colonial era, and its effect upon the development of Peru's coastal capital, in order to establish patterns and better predict future events. Manuel de Odriozola (1804-1889) was a Peruvian Colonel of cavalry and leading figure of the Independance of Peru, the director of the National Library of Peru from 1875-81, and a scholar most known for his Peruvian bibliographies. This work was his first publication. An uncommon work: Library Hub only locates two copies in the UK (Oxford, BL), WorldCat adds single copies in Peru and Europe, and ten in North America. Octavo. Later blind-tooled green roan, lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers. A folding map of Callao also showing a panoramic view of it prior to its destruction by an earthquake-triggered tsunami in 1746, and 2 folding astronomical tables recording the conjunctions between the… Read More

London: Admiralty Naval Intelligence Division,, 1944. First edition, first printing, of this scarce Second World War guide to waterborne craft in and around the Dutch East Indies, compiled by British intelligence for personnel operating in the Pacific theatre. Information on the availability of local seafaring vessels offered new possibilities for Allied counter-offensives in this strategically vital region. WorldCat notes just eight copies. This extensively illustrated work surveys pre-war craft by location and type, with chapters on: Outriggers; Sumatra and neighbouring islands; Java, Madoera and Bali; Celebes and neighbouring islands; the Moluccas; the Lesser Sunda Islands; Borneo; New Guinea and neighbouring islands; the Solomon Islands; and Fishing and Fisheries of the Netherlands Indies. Appendices add information on Australian craft and Japanese supply ships. After the occupation of much of South East Asia in 1942, Allied forces launched several counterattacks in the region. Local fishing… Read More

Tokyo: Shobido,, 1905. An ephemeral textbook for Meiji Japan's growing crop of English-language learners. While this is a fifth edition, published two years after the first, all editions are surprisingly elusive institutionally. We have traced one copy of the first at the National Diet Library, while the Osaka Prefectural Library possesses a copy of the fourth or fifth. The contents presents texts from Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Parker and others, as well as situational dialogues with strong nationalist and moral overtones. Frank Warrington Eastlake (1858-1905) was an American raised in Japan and Hong Kong who wrote a plethora of works on Japanese and Chinese language and history, including a number of dictionaries and phrase books. He was said to be fluent in 23 languages and spent the majority of his life in Japan teaching English. Small octavo. Original illustrated wrappers, spine lettered in yellow, front cover lettered in white and yellow, rear wrapper lettered in Japanese in brown. With… Read More

Milan: Bompiani,, 1988. First edition, first printing, of Eco's classic Italian novel which was translated into English by William Weaver the following year. Large octavo. Original red cloth-grain boards, titles in gilt to spine. With dust jacket. Frontispiece and occasional in-text diagram. Spine ends a touch rubbed, the binding otherwise firm and square, faint uniform toning to contents, as often, else internally clean and fresh. A near-fine copy in the very good jacket, unclipped, slight creasing and edge-splitting, notably unfaded.

Oxford: At the Clarendon Press,, 1927. First edition, first impression, of Eddington's discursive analysis of the atomic makeup of stars and nebulae. Stars & Atoms derived from public lectures and addresses delivered at King's College, London, and at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford in 1926. This copy contains the pencil signature on the front free endpaper, and brief pencil annotations to pp. 15-16, of Thomas Graeme Nelson Haldane (1897-1981), a Scottish engineer. Haldane worked on the development of the National Grid and latterly received the James Hawkesley Gold Medal for developing the geo-thermal energy infrastructure of New Zealand. In 1927, Haldane was employed at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge: he completed his undergraduate studies at Trinity College while Eddington was a fellow there. Haldane's interest in Eddington's study of solar matter and energy is intriguing in view of his subsequent work on energy infrastructures, and planetary energy in particular. A newspaper… Read More

London: Jonathan Cape,, 1926. First edition, first impression, in the scarce jacket, of this tale told in the manner of the Norse sagas. A scholar and author of epic fantasy novels whose works drew high praise from Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Eddison (1882-1945) was an occasional member of the Inklings. A clipping loosely inserted declares of the book that "with it Eddison claims the title of the last of the Skalds, faithful to tradition but yet with something of his own to contribute, so that his story telling is both old and new." Octavo. Original blue cloth, title to spine gilt, motif to front cover in gilt, illustrated endpapers. With dust jacket. With decorations by Keith Henderson. Bookseller's ticket and two bookplates to front pastedown. Boards slightly bowed, traces of glue remnants to first few pages; an excellent copy in the bright, price-clipped jacket.

Cambridge: The University Press,, 1930. With the scarce dust jacket First Eddison edition, first impression, scarce in the dust jacket. This was only the second translation into English, after W. C. Green's 1893 translation, which Eddison judged as "being so bad as to be unreadable". A Norse scholar and author of epic fantasy novels whose works drew high praise from Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Eddison (1882-1945) was an occasional member of the Inklings. This copy bears the mid-20th-century ownership inscription of R. H. Llewellyn, an expert on European medieval literature at Temple University, Philadelphia, on the front free endpaper. Octavo. Original red cloth (also found in green, no established priority), spine lettered in gilt. With dust jacket. With 2 double-page maps to rear. A very good copy, extremities rubbed, offsetting and foxing to endpapers, small chip and closed tear to rear free endpaper fore edge, in like dust jacket, price-clipped, negligible creasing and foxing to edges, a couple of… Read More

Cambridge: The University Press,, 1930. With the rare jacket First Eddison edition, first impression, scarce in the dust jacket. This was only the second translation into English, after W. C. Green's 1893 translation, which Eddison judged as "being so bad as to be unreadable". A Norse scholar and author of epic fantasy novels whose works drew high praise from Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Eddison (1882-1945) was an occasional member of the Inklings. Octavo. Original green cloth (also found in red, no established priority), spine lettered in gilt. With dust jacket, clipped with publisher's new price 21s. With 2 double-page maps to rear. Spotting to edges and toning from flaps to endpapers else a fine copy, in very good jacket, spine panel a little toned and soiled, 3.5 cm closed tear at head of rear joint.

London: Privately printed for Eton College in the Riccardi Press fount of the Medici Society Limited [colophon],, 1937. An attractive edition, privately produced by Eton College to present as gifts to students, here presented in 1942 by Eton headmaster Claude Aurelius Elliott as a leaving gift to Simon Gascoigne Eden, the eldest son of the Etonian prime minister Anthony Eden, from whose library it originates, recently dispersed following the death of his second wife Clarissa. After graduating from Eton Simon Gascoigne became an RAF sergeant, and was killed in June 1945 when his plane went down in a monsoon in Burma, just a few weeks before the end of the Second World War. The loss devastated Anthony Eden. His biographer describes it as the most distressing event of his life, notes that it likely ended his marriage to his first wife, and remarks that Eden always afterwards treasured his son's letters (Rhodes James, pp. 302-4) - surely this volume was an equally compelling memento. Quarto. Original… Read More

Paris: sur les presses de Georges Lang,, 1938. Presented to "the one British statesman for whom France had ever felt any tenderness" First edition, number 281 of 1,000 copies, presentation copy to British foreign secretary and future prime minister Anthony Eden, with the printed notice on the limitation page "Imprimé Spécialement pour La Très Honorable M. A. Eden Ancien Ministre de Affaires Étrangères", and with a pencilled inscription by Eden on the front free endpaper "This was the state visit for which I had worked as Foreign Secretary. As a consequence on my resignation at the end of Feb 1938, I could not accompany the King & Queen in July. The French govt gave me this book, as they told me the only copy to an absent guest. A.E." Published to commemorate the visit of the king and queen, the book is a photographic survey of France, its landscape, art, and people, with accompanying essays on the same. Eden had resigned as foreign secretary over the appeasement of Mussolini. He was reappointed… Read More

London: Chapman and Hall,, 1872. New edition of Emily Eden's second novel. It "was published anonymously in 1859 with the help of her lifelong friend Lady Theresa Lewis, who negotiated Eden's terms - no less than £300 and early publication - with Richard Bentley, the publisher. In this lively satirical novel, the pregnant heroine Lady Blanche Chester, whose husband has been posted abroad, shares the middle-class home of the Hopkinsons with the nouveau riche Baron Sampson and his wife. Blanche revises her class prejudices after experiencing the warmth of the Hopkinson family" (ODNB). Octavo. Contemporary dark green half morocco, flat raised bands, titles to compartments gilt, decorations to bands gilt, marbled sides, edges sprinkled red, pale brown endpapers. Ownership inscription to front pastedown. Spine faintly sunned, boards lightly rubbed, a few short splits along inner hinges, text block slightly strained in a couple of places. An excellent copy.

London: by J. Davis, for B. & J. White, G. & G. Robinson, T. Payne [& 4 others in London],, 1797. A classic of social analysis First edition of this classic of social and economic analysis, the first major study of the English poor; "it has proved the basis of sociological investigation ever since" (PMM). "The State of the Poor is one of the classical works in the history of economics. Eden was led to embark on the subject by the high prices brought on by the war in 1794 and 1795, and the effect they had on the living conditions of the poorer classes. He established the framework of his investigation by lengthy visits to several parishes; the rest was filled in by his many correspondents up and down the land... The results were published in three volumes; the first contained a description of the condition of the labouring classes and an analysis of its causes; the other two the supporting facts in the form of parochial reports on the administration of workhouses and houses of industry, friendly… Read More

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,, 1904. Rare original offprint Original offprint of Edgeworth's major work, "the most important of the papers relating to this subject" (Bowley). "The 1905 article 'The Law of Error' crowns Edgeworth's two-decade-long efforts concerning sums of elementary errors and simultaneously summarizes his previously achieved results on this and related topics. This voluminous paper is quite difficult to read, though by no means long-winded, and full of interesting details. 'Edgeworth expansions' are introduced and derived by three different methods. There is also a discussion of - in Edgeworth's own words - 'reproductive' distributions (stable distributions in modern terminology), and their significance as limit laws for sums of identically distributed random variables is demonstrated. Edgeworth illustrated his series expansions by discussing particular cases, such as sums of two-valued or rectangularly distributed random variables. He also tried to generalize his results… Read More

Shanghai: London Mission Press,, 1857. A remarkable language genius First edition, rare, of this monograph by the gifted linguist Joseph Edkins. Objecting to contemporary views of the Chinese language as "abnormal" and "misshapen", he endeavours to present a sophisticated portrayal, "in all their copiousness and variety, [of] the laws of combination existing in groups of words, and further to trace the origin and progress of the mandarin language by means of its literature" (p. i). Edkins (1823-1905) first arrived in China in 1848 under the auspices of the London Missionary Society. He spent the next 57 years in the country, first in Shanghai and then in Yantai, Tianjin, and Beijing. One of the first Protestant missionaries to reside in the capital, he assisted in the production of the New Testament in Mandarin. Proficient in Mandarin, Manchu, Miao, and Cantonese, he published over 20 sinological monographs including a study of the Shanghai dialect in 1853. For this work, he drew extensively on Li… Read More

London: Printed by J. Wright for Vernor and Hood,, 1805. Comprehensive study on breadmaking, uncut in the original boards First edition of this comprehensive study of bread-making, covering the cultivation of wheat, the corn trade, the preparation of the bread, substitutes for wheat, and the legislation surrounding the bread trade. The author declares in the preface his hope that "I anticipate the period when we shall see the art of bread-making, instead of forming a confused and unintelligible article in our encyclopaedias and dictionaries, attain its proper rank among the liberal sciences". Provenance: The Lawes Agricultural Library, with their shelfmarks and stamp to front pastedown. The library was assembled in the early 20th century by Sir John Russell, director of the Rothamsted agricultural research institution in Hertfordshire, and ranked as one of the finest English collections of agricultural material. Duodecimo (188 x 110 mm). Uncut in the original boards, discreetly rebacked and… Read More

London: Historical Section, War Cabinet Secretariat, October,, 1944. The rarest official history First and only edition, classified as "For Official Use Only" and never further developed or issued. Print run of 51, just a single copy - in the War Office records in the National Archives - traced outside of the Imperial War Museum. Beyond scarce. The work of the director of the historical section, military branch, committee of imperial defence, author of the majority of the British official history series, this concise account was produced around the same time as he was working on his volume on the Occupation of the Rhineland. As the Second World War entered its closing phases it was deemed appropriate to review previous occasions when British troops had occupied vanquished nations. The German volume was officially sanctioned, completed at length, printed in an edition of 100 and given "a limited official circulation" (French, p. 72), and in July 1944 Edmonds, who in the introductory note bemoans the… Read More

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company,, 1941. First edition, first printing. Winner of the 1942 Newbery Medal, Walter D, Edmonds's "stirring story of young American courage" (jacket blurb) - as a a family defend their home during the French and Indian Wars - would have resonated with a country recently committing young men to war. Paul Lantz's illustrations are very striking. Square octavo. Original natural hessian cloth, spine and front cover lettered in brown, pictorial endpapers. With dust jacket. 6 double-page colour plates, monochrome illustrations throughout by Paul Lantz. A few nicks and chips to jacket, back panel lightly soiled. An excellent copy.