Search Results: Titles starting with D from The Manhattan Rare Book Company

Llibreria, Catalonia: np, 1934. 1st Edition. Very Good. FIRST EDITION, with the EXTREMELY RARE AND SOUGHT-AFTER POCHOIR BY MIRÓ (From Here and There: Figures by the Sea); one of only five pochoirs created in his career. "After their first encounter, Miró and [the architect] Sert continued to meet often through the group of painters, sculptors, and art critics of the cultural group known as ADLAN (1932-1936)." Through the joint efforts of ADLAN and GATCPAC, a group of architects active from 1930 to 1936, came "the most representative publication of that period: a special issue of the magazine D'Aci i d'Allà focusing on twentieth-century art-the 1934 Christmas issue-directly supervised by Joan Prats and Josep Lluís Sert and with the participation of Joan Miró, in the first instance of a collaboration between the artist and the architect ... The result of this joint effort was far more than a mere revision of contemporary visual arts; it became a guidebook to the new trends and to the avant-garde… Read More

Leydon: Peter Leffen & Francis Moyard, 1662. First edition. contemporary vellum. Very Good. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST TEXTBOOK OF PHYSIOLOGY. "René Descartes's Treatise of man (De homine, 1662; Traité de l'homme, 1664) was never intended to stand as a work on its own. It was one part of a much larger work, Le monde (The world). Although this was finished around 1633, Descartes did not publish it himself because he was alarmed by the Italian Inquisition's condemnation of Galileo Galilei that year. Some time after Descartes's death in 1650, his French manuscript, copies of which had circulated among his friends and correspondents, was edited and published.  The first version was a Latin translation (De homine) by Florentius Schuyl in 1662, the second the now better known 'original' French version (Traité de l'homme) edited by Descartes's self-appointed literary executor Claude Clerselier in 1664. In the seventeenth century the… Read More

London: Jacob Tonson, 1712. First Tonson edition. contemporary calf. Very Good. THE MAGNIFICENT FIRST TONSON EDITION OF LUCRETIUS'S CLASSIC; COMPLETE WITH SEVEN FULL-PAGE ENGRAVINGS (ONE A LARGE FOLD-OUT). "Lucretius' literary influence has been long-lasting and widespread, especially among poets with epic ambitions or cosmological interests, from Virgil and Milton to Whitman and Wordsworth. Not surprisingly, as one of the main proponents and principal sources of Epicurean thought, his philosophical influence has also been considerable... "It is probably an exaggeration to say that the restoration and study of Lucretius' poem was crucial to the rise of Renaissance 'new philosophy' and the birth of modern science. On the other hand, one must not ignore its importance as a spur to innovative sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific thought and cosmological speculation. Greek atomism and Lucretius' account of the universe as an infinite, lawfully integrated… Read More

Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1912. First edition. Original wrappers. Very Good. FIRST PRINTING IN EXCEEDINGLY SCARCE ORIGINAL WRAPPERS of arguably Thomas Mann's most celebrated work. "At the beginning of 1911, Mann's health was poor and his development sluggish. Nothing he had published since Buddenbrooks had been received with such universal acclaim. He had planned but abandoned several long works, and had published chiefly short stories. Convinced that he needed to make a mark with a new piece that would appeal to current tastes, he poured all his mastery into Death in Venice ... The story was written between July 1911 and July 1912 ... Mann had intended it for S. Fischer's magazine, by that time merely called Die Neue Rundschau, but was uncharacteristically hesitant about submitting it once it was done-it was too innovative and personal. His wife convinced him to send it in. It was first published in the October and November 1912 issues" (S. Appelbaum). The publication in the October and November… Read More

Paris: Maeght. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Fine. LIMITED FIRST EDITION, number 128 of only 150 copies SIGNED BY STEINBERG. With three original color lithographs (one double-page) and numerous color reproductions throughout. Text by Italo Calvino. Printed on vélin d'Arches. Paris: Maeght, 1977. Folio, loose (as issued) in illustrated wrappers; housed in original chemise and slipcase. Fine condition.

London: The Royal Society, 1909. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Fine. FIRST EDITION OFFPRINT, PRESENTATION COPY, of Bohr's first published scientific paper, written while he was a 20-year-old student at Copenhagen University. Inscribed by Bohr in Danish on front wrapper to Poul Heegaard, mathematician and professor at Copenhagen University. In original wrappers. In February 1905 the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters announced a prize concerning Lord Rayleigh's 1879 theory that the surface tension of liquids could be determined from the surface vibrations of liquid jets. The problem proposed by the Academy was to perform quantitative experiments to implement Rayleigh's method. Bohr faced formidable difficulties, not least the fact that, since the university had no physics laboratory, Bohr had to perform the experiments at night (to avoid perturbations due to passing traffic) in his father's physiology laboratory. Bohr's paper was submitted on the deadline of 30 October 1906,… Read More

London: Printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, et al., 1755. First edition. Calf. Very Good. FIRST EDITION OF JOHNSON'S LANDMARK DICTIONARY. A monumental work by anyone's standards, Johnson's Dictionary took over eight years to complete. "With no real library at hand, Johnson wrote the definitions of over 40,000 words... illustrating the senses in which these words could be used by including about 114,000 quotations drawn from English writing in every field of learning during the two centuries from the middle of the Elizabethan period down to his own time" (W. Jackson Bate). "Johnson introduced into English lexicography principles which had already been accepted in Europe but were quite novel in mid-eighteenth-century England. He codified the spelling of English words; he gave full and lucid definitions of their meanings (often entertainingly coloured by his High Church and Tory propensities); and he adduced extensive and apt illustrations from a wide range of authoritative writers... His… Read More

First edition. Original wrappers. FIRST EDITION, THE PREFERRED ISSUE IN ILLUSTRATED WRAPPERS, OF ONE OF THE MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE. "On the evening of November 17, 1912, a young employee of the Workmen's Accident Insurance Agency, in Prague, sat down to work on a 'troubling little story' that had occurred to him 'in bed' the previous night. After spending the first part of the day in the office, he returned to the apartment he shared with his parents and thee sisters, had lunch, napped, took a walk, and then did a series of strengthening and stretching calisthenics. This was his daily ritual before settling in for the evening - and often far into the night - to what he considered his true life, a life dedicated to writing. Then, whether acting on a long-meditated plan or following an obscure, sudden intuition, he set down the words of the first hammerlike sentence of what would become his most famous story and one of the defining works of modern imaginative fiction, The Metamorphosis, or… Read More

Leipzig: Der Weissen Bücher, 1915. First edition. Original wrappers. Very Good. FIRST APPEARANCE OF A MASTERPIECE OF WESTERN LITERATURE, PRECEDING THE FIRST BOOK EDITION. "Kafka read the first section of his 'bug piece' (Wanzensache) aloud to friends on November 24, 1912, and again on December 15. People started talking about it, and Kafka received a query from publisher Kurt Wolff in March 1913 on the recommendation of Kafka's friend Franz Werfel. Franz Blei, the literary editor of the new avant-garde journal Die weissen Blätter, expressed interest, and Robert Musil wrote as well, soliciting the novella for the more established Die neue Rundschau. But months passed before Kafka had a clean manuscript ready for submission, and then World War I intervened, causing further delays... In the spring of 1915, René Schickele took over as editor-in-chief of Die weissen Blätter, and with Max Brod's help, Kafka placed the story there. It came out in October 1915, and… Read More

Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1914. FIRST EDITION OFFPRINT. Original wrappers. Fine. FIRST EDITION, COMMERCIAL OFFPRINT ISSUE, of Einstein's important 1914 paper on the development of general relativity. "In summer 1914, Einstein felt that the new theory [general relativity] should be presented in a comprehensive review. He also felt that a mathematical derivation of the field equations that would determine them uniquely was still missing. "Both tasks are addressed in a long paper, presented in October 1914 to the Prussian Academy for publication in its Sitzungsberichte. It is entitled 'The formal foundation of the general theory of relativity'; here, for the first time, Einstein gave the new theory of relativity the epithet 'general' in lieu of the more cautious 'generalized' that he had used for the Entwurf" (Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics 1640-1940). "According to John Norton ('How Einstein Found His Field… Read More

Minneapolis: The American Physical Society, 1927. First edition. Original wrappers. Very Good. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS of Davisson and Germer's confirmation of de Broglie's hypothesis that matter has wave-like properties. "A 1927 paper in the Physical Review demonstrated that particles of matter can act like waves, just as light waves sometimes behave like particles. Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, then in New York, found that electrons scatter from a crystal in the same way that x rays do. The work began as a result of a laboratory accident and ultimately earned Davisson a Nobel Prize. "In 1924, Louis de Broglie... proposed that matter, like light, has a dual nature. The next year, graduate student Walter Elsasser of the University of Göttingen in Germany proposed a way to test it: If electrons do have a wave nature, they should, like light, exhibit wave phenomena such as diffraction. In one form of diffraction, a light beam passing through a… Read More

Prague [Praha]: Odeon. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Very Good. The Czech translation of Proust's masterpiece, complete in original wrappers, with book design by Karel Teige. With simple designs, distinctive topography and titles printed in red and black, Teige's edition of Proust is a quintessential example of his work and a classic representation of the Czech avant-garde. Praha [Prague]: Odeon, 1927-1930. Complete in 15 volumes with the supplement (Benjamin Cremieux, Marcel Proust, 1928). Octavo, original wrappers in various colors. Owner signatures. General minor wear to wrappers, fading to spines. First title page neatly detached. A monument of book design; rare in original wrappers.

Menasha, Wi: Institute Of Radio Engineers, 1932,, 1932. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Fine. FIRST EDITIONS IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS of Karl Jansky's ground-breaking papers announcing the discovery of radio astronomy, a new science that has become one of the essential methods for making modern astronomical observations. Working at Bell Labs, Jansky "was given the task of investigating factors that could interfere with radio waves used for long-distance communication. He designed a linear directional antenna, which, mounted on wheels from a Model T Ford, could scan the sky. He indentified all the sources of interference, such as thunderstorms, except for one weak emission. This he found to be unconnected with the Sun and in 1931 he discovered that the radio interference came from the stars. Jansky published his findings in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers in December 1932 ['Directional Studies of Atmospherics at High Frequencies'], the date that marks precisely the beginnings of radio… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1939. First edition. Original wrappers. Fine. FIRST PRINTING IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS OF THE FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE DISCOVERY OF NUCLEAR FISSION. A FINE COPY. PMM 422B. "Experiments conducted in 1938 at Berlin by Hahn and Strassman were reported to Lise Meitner, an Austrian scientist who had fled to Copenhagen to escape religious persecution. She and her nephew, O.R. Frisch, working in Niels Bohr's laboratory, found the true explanation of these phenomenon. The interpolation of a neutron into the the nucleus of a uranium atom caused it to divide into two parts and to release energy amounting to about 200,000,000 electron volts. This process bore such a close similarity to the division of a living cell that Frisch suggested the use of the term 'fission' to describe it" (Printing and the Mind of Man, 422b). IN: Nature, Vol. 143, No. 3615, pp. 239-40. London: Macmillan & Co., February 11, 1939. Octavo, original wrappers; custom box. Small chip at top of… Read More

Upsala, Sweden: Johan Edman. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Fine. EXTREMELY RARE FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS of Bergman's study of chemical affinities, including a large fold-out table, "the finest achievement in the tradition of affinity tables," and a major predecessor of the periodic table. "Tobern Bergman published his table of chemical affinities and his accompanying 90-page Latin Dissertation of Elective Attractions in 1775, approximately three-quarters of a century before Dmitri Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer published their periodic tables of the chemical elements..." Bergman "put himself to this enormous task [of classifying chemical affinities] and produced... the most elaborate affinity table so far, comprising 50 columns and constructed for two different analytical methods: dry and wet ways.... Bergman's table represented a giant stride in chemists' capacity for analytic control. It listed 25 separate acids, 15 earths, and 16 metallic calces...… Read More

New York and Washington: Walt Whitman, 1865. First Edition. Publisher's Cloth. Very Good. FIRST EDITION OF WHITMAN'S IMPORTANT COLLECTION OF CIVIL WAR POEMS. THE PREFERRED "SECOND ISSUE" WITH THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE "SEQUEL" CONTAINING POEMS WHITMAN WROTE AFTER THE DEATH OF LINCOLN. Drum-Taps, Walt Whitman's first book of poems not entitled Leaves of Grass, emerged from seismic shifts in Walt Whitman the man, Walt Whitman the writer, and the American nation. While Leaves of Grass is a work of joyful exuberance, youthful exploration, sexual liberation, and a metaphorical consummation of a man's love for his nation, Drum-Taps offers no such euphoric exaltations. After years of civil war, Whitman could no longer embrace the nation as a unified land of hope, open spaces, and endless possibilities; indeed, after visiting his brother George on the battlefield in 1863, Whitman famously joined the war effort - not as a soldier - but as a nurse. Beside the injured and dying men on the battlefields,… Read More

Deventer: The Octopus Foundation and Sonsbeek 71, 1971. First edition. Original card covers. Very Good. FIRST EDITION OF THE RAREST RUSCHA BOOK; ONE OF ONLY AN ESTIMATED 200 COPIES. IN OUTSTANDING CONDITION. "In December 1970, Ruscha was invited to produce a photobook in conjunction with the Sonsbeek 71 exhibition in the Netherlands. Wim Beeren, the commissioner of the international festival, chose the location (Stadskanaal-a village in Groningen built along both sides of a straight canal) for the commission, but left the specifics of the project up to Ruscha. Once on site, Ruscha began photographing the facades of the houses along the canal, undoubtedly informed by his panorama of Los Angeles, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). The topography of the Dutch village led Ruscha to a different approach, however, and the book is conceptually more performative than the earlier work, inasmuch as it directly encompasses a site-specific action: the artist's journey back and forth across the bridges… Read More

Philadelphia: The Franklin Institute, 1931. First edition. cloth. Very Good. FIRST EDITION WITH IMPORTANT PROVENANCE OF THE FIRST REPORT ON VANNEVAR BUSH'S DIFFERENTIAL ANALYZER, THE MOST POWERFUL COMPUTING MACHINE PRIOR TO THE ELECTRONIC DIGITAL COMPUTER. "In 1930, an engineer named Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed the first modern analog computer. The Differential Analyzer, as he called it, was an analog calculator that could be used to solve certain classes of differential equations... Utilizing a complicated arrangement of gears and cams driven by steel shafts, the Differential Analyzer could obtain practical (albeit approximate) solutions to problems which up to that point had been prohibitively difficult. The Differential Analyzer was a great success; it and various copies located at other laboratories were soon employed in solving diverse engineering and physics problems" (Britannica). The "challenge of linking together multiple… Read More