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

Hollinwood/Lancs: Ferranti, Ltd, 1951. First edition. Very Good. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS OF THE MANUAL FOR ONE OF THE FIRST VIDEO GAMES. VERY POSSIBLY THE FIRST COMPUTER GAME MANUAL. Although they were "keen to be involved" in the 1951 Festival of Britain, electrical engineering firm and computing pioneer Ferranti was still without an exhibit by late 1950. John Bennet, an employee of the firm, stepped up and suggested the construction of a machine that could play Nim, a matchstick game in which players compete to force a final move.

 The Nimrod is considered to be the first or second computer game ever constructed, depending on how one defines the term, and is certainly the first to be constructed and played outside of North America. It was inspired by the Nimatron, an "electro-mechanical machine exhibited at the 1940 World's Fair in New York City" that also played Nim (Donovan), which isn't typically considered a computer, and followed only Toronto's Bertie the Brain, built in… Read More

London: Victor Gollancz. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. FIRST EDITION. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1992. Octavo, original grey boards, original dust jacket. Slight creasing to top of rear panel of dust jacket. A BRIGHT, CLEAN COPY.

Lancaster and New York: American Physical Society. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Fine. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS of the discovery of the "Lamb shift" "Shortly after World War II, Lamb began his work to check the accuracy of the predictions of Paul Dirac as they related to the energy levels and spectral lines of hydrogen. Dirac's quantum mechanical theory predicted that the hydrogen atom had two possible energy states with equal energies. Lamb's accurate work using radiofrequency resonance techniques, reported in 1947, revealed that there was a minute difference in these energy levels. Small as it was, this Lamb shift necessitated a revision of the theory of the interaction of the electron with electromagnetic radiation. For this work Lamb was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, which he shared with another leader of research at Columbia, Polykarp Kusch, with whom he had performed wartime research in developing microwave radar" (.Biographical Encyclopedia of… Read More

London: John Harrison, George Bishop, Rafe Newberie, Henrie Denham, and Thomas Woodcocke, 1587. Second Edition. 18th-century calf rebacked. Very Good. THE SECOND EDITION (1587) OF HOLINSHED'S "CHRONICLES": THE BOOK AND THE EDITION USED BY SHAKESPEARE AS A SOURCE FOR A DOZEN OF HIS PLAYS. "In 1548, the prominent London printer and bookseller Reyner (or Reginald) Wolfe ambitiously decided to produce a universal history and cosmography... of the world. After Wolfe's death in 1573, his assistant Raphael Holinshed took over the project, hired more writers and restrained its scope to the British Isles. The Chronicles was first published in 1577 in a two-volume folio edition, illustrated with numerous woodcuts. After Holinshed's death in 1580, Abraham Fleming published the significantly expanded revised second edition of 1587 in a larger folio format, this time without illustrations" (British Library). By scholarly consensus, it is the second (1587) edition, offered here, that Shakespeare used as the… Read More

New York: Charles Cowles, 1971. First edition. Original wrappers, custom box. Very Good. THE GROUNDBREAKING APPEARANCE OF DIANE ARBUS'S PHOTOGRAPH'S IN ARTFORUM. By 1971, "an appreciation of [Arbus's] photography was building in the art world at large... The most gratifying acknowledgement of her as an artist came not from a museum but from a magazine. Through Henry Geldzahler, the contemporary-art curator at the Metropolitan Museum, Arbus arranged a meeting with Philip Leider. The founding editor of Artforum, an influential monthly art magazine that championed modernism, Leider regarded the sculptor and land artist Robert Smithson as the most significant artist of the day. He had never featured a photographer in his pages. He didn't believe photography mixed with painting and sculpture; he wasn't even convinced that it was an art form. But he agreed to meet Geldzahler in Arbus's apartment and look at the pictures in her portfolio. "Even though he was very aware… Read More

Tokyo: Yugensha. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Fine. LIMITED FIRST EDITION, ONE OF ONLY 500 COPIES. A FINE COPY IN THE ORIGINAL SHIPPING BOX. Created "primarily as a memorial album to his daughter, Andrea, who was killed in an aeroplane crash ... the whole tenor of the book is forlorn... Never have flowers-that most uplifting of subjects-appeared so woebegone. Seldom has the manic activity of industrial manufacture seemed so pointless. And the Nova Scotia landscapes and still lifes-beautiful, bleak, elegiac-reveal an artist at the height of his powers but hardly at peace with the world or himself." Flower Is... constitutes "a major new statement in still photography... [and] can serve as an eminently fitting apotheosis for stream-of-consciousness photography" (The Photobook, I.264). Designed by Kohei Sugiura with Atsushi Sato. With introduction by Frank. Illustrated with 81 full-page photographs. (Tokyo): (Yugensha), (1987). Folio (343x250mm), original pictorial gray silk,… Read More

Lancaster and New York: American Physical Society. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Very Good. FIRST EDITION of Feynman's undergraduate thesis at MIT, "a fundamental discovery" published in The Physical Review when he was just twenty-one. "Forces or energy-that was the choice for those seeking to apply the quantum understanding of the atom to the workings of real materials. At stake was not mere terminology but a root decision about how to conceive of a problem and how to proceed in calculating...

 "As Feynman conceived the structure of molecules, forces were the natural ingredients. He saw springlike bonds with varying stiffness, atoms attracting and repelling one another. The usual energy-accounting methods seemed secondhand and euphemistic... [He demonstrated that] the force on an atom's nucleus is no more or less than the electrical force from the surrounding field of charged electrons-the electrostatic force. Once the distribution of charge has been… Read More

Brussels: n.p., 1921. First edition. Custom box. Fine. EARLY CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN MAGRITTE AND HIS GOOD FRIEND, PAINTER AND POET PIERRE-LOUIS FLOUQUET, WITH PERSONAL COMMENTS ON LIFE AND ART. WITH ORIGINAL PENCIL DRAWING BY MAGRITTE. Having met at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, René Magritte (1898-1967) and Pierre-Louis Flouquet (1900-1967) shared a studio on the Rue de Alexiens and later exhibited together at the short-lived Centre d'Art founded in December 1919. In 1920, Flouquet undertook his military service in France, and Magritte would write regularly to keep up his friend's morale. In 1927- having worked so closely as to render many of their works form this period indistinguishable-the two men grew somewhat apart, with Magritte turning sharply towards Surrealism while Flouquet moved towards figurative art. The present letters thus fill a gap in the important period of correspondence before his rift with Flouquet and his pivotal development of a Surrealist aesthetic. Included… Read More

London: The Royal Society, 1925. First edition. Original wrappers. Very Good. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS of Dirac's first major paper; a major achievement in the advancement of the new quantum theory. "Dirac's first step into a new quantum theory was taken late in September 1925. R H Fowler, his research supervisor, had received a proof copy of an exploratory paper by Werner Heisenberg in the framework of the old quantum theory of Bohr and Sommerfeld, which leaned heavily on Bohr's correspondence principle but changed the equations so that they involved directly observable quantities. Fowler sent Heisenberg's paper on to Dirac, who was on vacation in Bristol, asking him to look into this paper carefully. Dirac's attention was drawn to a mysterious mathematical relationship, at first sight unintelligible, that Heisenberg had reached. Several weeks later, back in Cambridge, Dirac suddenly recognized that this mathematical form had the same structure as the Poisson… Read More