Search Results: Titles starting with I from 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop

FIRST EDITION. Inscribed to René Magritte: "A René Magritte, ces textes mal informés en 1944, écrit en hâte, mais prophétiques. E. L. T. Mesens." This scarce English Surrealist tract attacks the so-called resistance poetry of Paul Eluard and Aragon as "conformist."
Mesens was Magritte's longtime friend and promoter. An artist and dealer, he was instrumental in promoting Surrealism in Belgium and then in England, where he introduced the Magritte's work. He organized the first surrealist exhibition in Belgium (1934) and the International Surrealist Exhibition (1936). Later he presented the first major Magritte retrospective (Brussels, 1954).

4pp. Separated at horizontal fold, edgewear.

One page. Beautifully presented in a spectacular 19th-century carved wood frame with surmounted eagle. Abraham Lincoln, writing at the outset of the Civil War, recommends that the Army admit three volunteers from the highly divided city of Baltimore. He advises Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, "I hate to reject any [volunteers] offered from what is called a Southern State."Maryland's Southern sympathies were of paramount concern to Lincoln. On February 23, 1861, learning of a rumored assassination plot, president-elect Lincoln passed through Baltimore in secrecy to reach Washington. On April 19, 1861, just a week after the surrender of Fort Sumter, a mob killed four soldiers and wounded thirty-six more when the 6th Massachusetts Infantry passed through Baltimore en route to Washington. A week later Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus to maintain control in the state. Maryland's governor had ordered the militia to burn railroad bridges north of the city to prevent more federal troops from… Read More

Two sixth-plate daguerreotypes, cased together. Left: nurse and child ("Bradford & Ellen Sherwood his nurse"), right: parents ("Jonathan P. Harrison & his wife Caroline Denny Harrison"). White family's cheeks are hand-tinted and the baby's dress is hand-colored. Some spots, edges tarnished.
A tremendous pair. Jonathan P. Harrison (born 23 December 1829) and his wife Caroline Denny Harrison (born c. 1834) are in one portrait, while their son Bradford (born c. 1853) and his black nurse Ellen Sherwood are in the other.
The Harrison family moved from Talbot County on Maryland's Eastern Shore to Texas in the 1850s to pursue ranching and farming opportunities. According to the U.S. Census, in 1860 the family lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, with Jonathan reported as 29 years old, Caroline 26, and Bradford 7, indicating a date of 1853 for this photograph.
The Harrisons and Dennys were prominent Maryland and Texas families. Jonathan served with the 1st Texas Cavalry during the Civil War. Identified… Read More

11 gelatin silver prints. 9 ¾ x 7 ½ in. Photographer's stamp and descriptive carbon typescript captions on versos. Very good condition.
This West End revival of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest
opened on February 8, 1968 and ran for 283 performances at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. The production starred Isabel Jeans, Daniel Massey, Helen Weir, and John Standing, among others.
"Angus McBean's iconic portraits of actors and entertainers are among the most complete visual records of the British stage from the 1930s through the 1960s" (Harvard).

81 albumen prints on carte de visite mounts, inserted two per page in the original calf CDV album, brass clasps. Rubbed. Excellent condition overall.
This is likely the most important extant Charles Darwin family photograph album. The scientist's wife Emma Darwin evidently assembled this well-preserved album of cartes de visite and has identified almost all of the sitters with initials or names on the album mounts.
The dazzling array of sitters includes Charles Darwin, his wife Emma, all seven of their children who reached maturity, a grandchild, and other relations from both family lines, the Darwins and the Wedgwoods. The families of some of Darwin's principal scientific peers are also represented including Huxley, Galton, Lyell, Hooker, Haeckel, Henslow, and more.
This album also collects important photographs known from Darwin's correspondence to have been sent to the naturalist. Their whereabouts or survival has been unknown until now. For example, the photographs of German scientist Ernst… Read More

First separate edition. This is Stein's lecture delivered on the occasion of being awarded the Society's Huxley Medal.Original wrappers. 4to. pp. (179)-202, 7 leaves of plates, 2 folding maps. Old owner's inscription along spine giving the work's author and title, edge fading, else very good.

SIXTH EDITION of the most important book in the history of economics. One of 2000 sets. The sixth edition is the first to have been published after Smith's death in 1790.
"The Wealth of Nations had no rival in scope or depth when published and is still one of the few worked in its field to have achieved classic status, meaning simply that it has sustained yet survived repeated reading, critical and adulatory, long after the circumstances which prompted it have become the object of historical enquiry" (ONDB).
Smith's Wealth of Nations has been the bible for generations of laissez-faire economists and political philosophers and is the cornerstone book of free-market theory. His individualistic view of political economy is neatly summarized in a famous quotation from the Wealth of Nations: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their… Read More

28pp. Original printed front wrapper, rear wrapper lacking. A little dogeared, some chipping.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's signed copy of this work on Salem's old burying-grounds. The tomb of Nathaniel Mather, memorialized here, was an important inspiration for Hawthorne.
In this book, the antiquarian David Pulsifer recorded the words found on Salem tombstones. Familiar names of old Salem are listed—Corey, Crowninshield, Ingersoll, Pickman, Ropes—as well as several of Hawthorne's own distant ancestors. But of greatest interest is the tombstone for Cotton Mather's younger brother Nathaniel: "Mr. Nathaniel Mather. Dec'd. October ye 17th, 1688." The epitaph, printed on page 18, reads:
An aged personthat had seenbut nineteen wintersin the world.
Hawthorne mentions this very tombstone in Fanshawe, his first novel, when he describes the tombstone of his protagonist: "This [inscription] was borrowed from the grave of Nathanael Mather, whom, in his almost insane eagerness for knowledge and in his early death,… Read More

14 pp. Mimeograph, printed rectos only, stapled. Light browning. Very good.
PRE-PUBLICATION RARITY. "The classic paper published in Nature that started it all" (coseti.org), this is the founding work of optical SETI. This pre-publication form is dated more than a month before the article's publication in Nature. For years SETI research focused on radio transmissions, but the development of powerful lasers has made Optical SETI (OSETI) a highly promising area of research. Townes's prescient proposal is even the more remarkable given the very limited power of masers and lasers at the time this paper appeared.
Charles Hard Townes, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is most famous for his work on the theory and application of the maser, on which he received the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics connected with both maser and laser devices. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov "for fundamental work in the field of quantum… Read More