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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. GROUCHY, Nicolas de. 

    Praeceptiones dialecticae, Nicolao Gruchio Rotomagensi authore.  Disputatio eiusdem, quid de nomine dialectices...

    Paris, Gabriel Buon, 1563. 

    An apparently unrecorded edition of Grouchy’s abstract of his lectures on logic and Aristotelian dialectic.  The philologist Nicolas de Grouchy (1510–1572) spent twelve years in Bordeaux (1535-47) as professor of rhetoric at the Collège de Guyenne (the top class was called ‘Classe de Rhétorique’),...

    £750

  2. HARDY, Campbell.

    Sporting Adventures in the New World; or, Days and Nights of Moose-Hunting in the Pine Forests of Acadia …

    London, Hurst and Blackett, 1855.

    First edition of this most interesting account of Nova Scotia, Canada, by the Royal Artillery officer Campbell Hardy (1831–1919).

    £575

  3. HAREL, Charles.

    Ménage sociétaire ou Moyen d’augmenter son bien-être en diminuant sa dépense, avec indication de quelques...

    Paris, Bureau de la Phalange, à la librairie Sociale, 1839.

    First edition of this work by the entrepreneur and inventor Charles Harel (1771–1852), a friend and disciple of Charles Fourier’s, describing Harel’s project for the founding of an utopian community of two hundred people housed in a single building, bound with eight other works in a sammelband...

    £975

  4. [HIGHWAYMEN.]

    Processo formato contro due famosissimi banditi Giacomo Legorino, e Battista Scorlino, con suoi seguaci, quali furono...

    Milan, Pietro Francesco Malatesta, [1744].

    Seemingly unrecorded printing of the trials of two sixteenth-century Italian highwaymen and their gang, whose campaign of terror in Milan lasted eight years.

    £500

  5. HIRSCH, William.

    Genius and Degeneration. A Psychological Study.

    New York, Appleton, 1896.

    First edition in English, translated from the second edition of the German original, Genie und Entartung (1895).

    £150

  6. HODSON, Thomas.

    The Accomplished Tutor; or, complete System of liberal Education … Embellished with twenty Copper-plates and...

    London, H. D. Symonds, and Vernor and Hood, 1802.

    Second edition, revised, of a voluminous catch-all schoolbook (first published 1800), by the disabled author Thomas Hodson, of the Middle Temple.

    £300

  7. HOPKINS, William. 

    Address delivered at the Hull Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, September...

    London, Taylor & Francis, 1853. 

    First edition, an 1853 Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science by its President William Hopkins (1793–1866), inscribed by the author and given to his erstwhile student Francis Galton (1822–1911).  A mathematician and geologist, Hopkins became President of the British Association...

    £350

  8. HOWARD, John.

    An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe; with various Papers relative to the Plague: together with further...

    Warrington, Eyres, Cadell, Johnson, Dilly and Taylor, 1789.

    First edition of Howard’s study of quarantine hospitals for victims of infectious diseases throughout Europe. This work, illustrated with 22 plans and views of hospitals, was the continuation of Howard’s investigative reporting which had begun when he served as High Sheriff, with his State of...

    £575

  9. ‘HURLBUT’ [i.e. HURLBERT], William Henry.

    Pictures of Cuba.

    London: M’Corquodale and Co. for Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1855.

    First British edition, revised and retitled, issued in the ‘Traveller’s Library’ series. Pictures of Cuba was first published under the title Gan-Eden: or, Pictures of Cuba (Boston: 1854), and Hurlbert (1827-1895) states in his preface that, ‘In the short time that has elapsed since...

    £150

  10. [INDUSTRIOUS POOR, Charitable Corporation for the Relief of.]

    The present state of the unhappy sufferers of the Charitable Corporation...

    London, [n.p.], 1733.

    First and only edition of an anonymous plea to Parliament for the rescue of the Charitable Corporation for the Relief of the Industrious Poor, a pawnbroker which granted credit at low interest to the ‘deserving poor’ who left a pledge. Founded in 1707, in the 1720s the Corporation came under scrutiny...

    £250

  11. [INTERSEX.]

    Three pamphlets.

    Paris, 1892–1920.

    A collection of rare French pamphlets on the subject of differences in sex development from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two of the three pamphlets are doctoral theses, covering the social impact of differences in sex development, and persistent müllerian duct syndrome (‘tubular...

    £450

  12. JENKINS, Edward.

    The Devil’s Chain … Twentieth Thousand. With twelve Illustrations by Barnard and Thomson.

    [Southwark, M’Corquodale and Co. for] London and Belfast, William Mullan & Son, 1877.

    A reissue of the illustrated edition, from a different publishing house, of this lively narrative tracing the ‘universally ruinous effect of drink on all classes of the English population’ (Sutherland) by Member of Parliament, anti-slavery campaigner, and ardent imperialist Edward Jenkins.

    £100

  13. [JOUY, Étienne de; Pierre-François GODARD.]

    [Jeux de cartes instructives. Histoire d’Angleterre.]

    N.p., n.d. [France, c. 1800–1815].

    A rare early nineteenth-century French set of ‘instructive playing cards’ for teaching children about the kings and queens of England.

    £475

  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. JUVENAL.

    The Satires … translated: with explanatory and classical Notes, relating to the Laws and Customs of the Greeks and Romans …

    London, for J. Nicholson, Cambridge; and sold by S. Crowder and J. and F. Rivington, 1777.

    Third edition of this parallel-text translation edited by Thomas Sheridan, first published 1739. Contemporary annotations (one is dated 1779) provide succinct summaries of the subject of each satire. Satire II for example ‘scourges the Hypocrisy, Effeminacy, & Bestiality of his Countrymen, as contradistinguished...

    £1250

  16. [JUVENILE.]

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

    London, William Darton, 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. KEATE, George. 

    An Account of the Pelew Islands, situated in the western part of the Pacific Ocean: composed from the journals...

    Dublin, Luke White, 1788. 

    First Dublin edition of this popular work, first published in London earlier the same year, by the virtuoso George Keate, member of the Royal Society and Society of Antiquities (1729−1797). 

    £650

  18. [KNIGHT, Charles.]

    The Elephant, principally viewed in Relation to Man: A new Edition, revised by the Author.

    London, William Clowes & Sons for Charles Knight & Co., 1844.

    First editions of treatises on the elephant and the horse, from Charles Knight’s Library of Entertaining Knowledge. The equine text gives accounts of horses and related species in several cultures and climes, and, with The Elephant, forms two works from a series of three, on ‘the three quadrupeds...

    £275

  19. KOCH, Manfred (pr.), Primo SCHLECHTEN and Feliciano SCHARRER (resp.).

    Philosophia rationalis sive logica centum assertionibus comprehensa...

    Augsburg, Afra Sturmin, 1695.

    A good copy of this rare dissertation from the Augustinian college at Rottenbuch in Bavaria, attempting to reduce logic (the science of reasoning) to one hundred numbered paragraphs. Describing the function and limits of logic, the authors, both Austin canons at Rottenbuch, explain the use of syllogisms,...

    £275

  20. KOCH, Mansuetus.

    Philosophia transnaturalis, sive metaphysica, centum assertionibus comprehensa, et publicae disputationi in celeberrimo...

    Augsburg, Maria Magdalena Utzschneiderin, 1697.

    Only edition (complete despite the pagination) of this dissertation defended at the Augustinian college in Rottenbuch, attempting to provide a survey of metaphysics in one hundred paragraphs. The work explains, among other matters, the scope and purpose of metaphysics, the basis of Aristotelian metaphysics,...

    £225