BERNARD QUARITCH LTD A LIST OF NEW ACQUISTIONS FOR JUNE 2015 1. COBDEN-SANDERSON, Thomas James. Ecce mundus: industrial ideals and the book beautiful. Hammersmith, Hammersmith Publishing Society, 1902. Small 4to, pp. [38], [2 blank]; clean and crisp in the original buff paper boards with parchment spine lettered ‘Ecce Mundus’; a very good copy with a presentation inscription on the front free endpaper, ‘G. M. Anderson T. J. Cobden-Sanderson 14 October 1917’. £200 A handsome copy, elegantly printed at the Chiswick Press, and signed by the author in the same year in which he closed the Doves Press. The book was sold at 7 Hammersmith Terrace, where Cobden-Sanderson had moved with his family in 1897 and which was close to the homes of William Morris and Emery Walker. Published after he had established the Doves Bindery (1893) and the Doves Press (1900), Ecce Mundus comprises two essays. In the first, Cobden-Sanderson explains his ideal for an Association of Bookbinders, including a plan of lectures, and of an Association of Miners, presenting his views more generally on what Trade Guilds might achieve. In the second essay, The book beautiful, he discusses calligraphy, typography (with mention of William Morris), and illustration, writing in conclusion: ‘if the book beautiful may be beautiful by virtue of its writing or printing or illustration, it may also be beautiful, be even more beautiful, by the union of all to the production of one composite whole.’ 2. [DECORATED WRAPPERS]. Sacra congregatione particulari a Sanctissimo deputata [...] Aesina collectarum super pertinentia bonorum in specie. Pro Ill.ma civitate Aesina, ac in ea, eiusque territorio possidentibus. Rome, Rev. Camera Apostolica, 1751. Folio, pp. 76; a very good copy, bound in outstanding eighteenth-century decorated wrappers, with gilt floral tracery and motifs on red background. £350 A very attractively bound copy, rare, of a restrictus determining the ownership and pertinence of taxation in the Marche city of Jesi, which had belonged to the Papal States since 1580. The recent prosperity of the city, which had seen the treasury’s income from trade and rent increase sharply since the beginning of the eighteenth century, made this legislation all the more important. Taxation sources and prerogatives of levy are detailed in their substance as well as origins, from castles and agrarian rent in the surrounding area, to grains, woodland, city rent, fines, and custom. Not in ICCU. 3. EDGEWORTH, Francis Ysidro. A collection of offprints. 1884-1923. 27 offprints; in very good condition. £5750 A substantial collection of mathematical contributions by Edgeworth, including ‘The law of error’, ‘the most important of the papers relating to this subject’ (Bowley), and the landmark essay on measurement On the probable errors of frequency-constants. ‘Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was an economists’ economist: almost the whole of his literary output was addressed to his fellow economists, taking the form of elegant technical essays on taxation, monopoly and duopoly pricing, the pure theory of international trade and the theory of index numbers . His exposition was terse and obscure at the best of times and his personality was retiring, with the result that most of his ideas were and still are continually being rediscovered by those who arrive at them in their own way. Marshall for example, was decisively influenced by Edgeworth on a number of technical points and yet Edgeworth always deferred to Marshall as the master at whose feet he sat. When the Economic Journal was founded in 1891 as the organ of the Royal Economic Society, Edgeworth became its editor, a task he carried on for 35 years [. .] ‘Edgeworth’s contributions to economics are legion, and there is space to mention only a few of them: he was the first to define the laws of diminishing returns in terms of the decline of the marginal product of a variable factor, whereas everyone before him right back to Malthus and Ricardo always defined it in terms of the decline of the average product; he was the first to define a “generalised utility function”, the utility of a good depending not just on the quantity consumed of that good but on the quantities of all other goods consumed by the individual, thus bringing substitutability and complementarity between goods squarely within the purview of utility theory; he was also the first to introduce indifference curves, the loci of combinations of two goods conveying equal total utility (drawn upside down as compared with the way they are nowadays drawn), as well as the “contract curve”, the locus of tangency points of the indifference curves of different individuals. But his most beautiful contribution is the theory of the core of an exchange economy . [His] insight has proved valuable to modern games theorists in proving the existence of general equilibrium à la Walras [. .] ‘Of all the great economists in this book, he is (apart from Bernoulli and Slutsky) the only one to have made original contributions to mathematical statistics’ (Mark Blaug, Great economists before Keynes, 1986, pp. 69-71). For a full listing and individual prices please contact us. REVISED BY HENRY FIELDING 4. [FIELDING, Sarah.] The Adventures of David Simple: containing an Account of his Travels through the Cities of London and Westminster, in the Search of a real Friend. By a Lady. In two Volumes. The second Edition, revised and corrected. With a Preface by Henry Fielding Esq: London: Printed for A. Millar, 1744. Two volumes, 12mo, pp. xx, 278, [2, advert.]; [2, title-page printed as O6], 322; occasional slight toning, split in blank inner margin of L6 in volume I, catchword torn away from D2 in volume II, else a good copy in contemporary polished calf, red morocco labels, a little worn. £650 Second edition. David Simple, disillusioned by the discovery that his cherished younger brother has attempted to rob him by means of a forged will, sets out to try to rediscover true friendship. His first experiences convince him that mercenary motives govern the world. Then he meets Cynthia, excluded from her father’s will and ill-treated by her employer, and the distressed brother and sister, Valentine and Camilla, whose stepmother has alienated their father’s affection. The four young people wander about London discussing what they see, telling and listening to stories, until, inevitably, David and Camilla, and Valentine and Cynthia are betrothed. The novel offers an excellent picture of the London scene. In the important new preface, first published here, Henry Fielding disclaims authorship – he was away on circuit when his sister’s novel came out and returned to find that the book was being attributed to him. ‘I have been reputed and reported the Author of half the Scurrility, Bawdy, Treason and Blasphemy, which these few last Years have produced’. He desires ‘to do Justice to the real and sole Author of this Book, who, notwithstanding the many excellent Observations dispersed through it, and the deep Knowledge of Human Nature it discovers, is a young Woman’. He refers to his theory that works of this kind are comic epics in prose, and observes that in David Simple the incidents are everywhere natural, and ‘that every Episode bears a manifest Impression of the principal Design.’ Fielding’s absence from Town also prevented him from correcting ‘some Grammatical and other Errors is Style in the first Impression’, which he has corrected ‘though in great Haste’ in the second edition. Sarah, like many women authors, was addicted to the dash, and Henry took most of them out. His principal change, however, was to expand the hero’s meditation on friendship. MILLENNIAL PROGRESS TOWARDS THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 5. HODÉ, Jacques. L’Idée de féderation internationale dans l’histoire. Les précurseurs de la Société des Nations. Thèse pour le doctorat (sciences, politiques et economiques) présentée et soutenue le 7 juin 1921 par Jacques Hodé, diplômé de l’Ecole des Sciences Politiques. Paris, Vie Universitaire, 1921. 8vo, pp. 294, [2 blank]; some very small tears to fore-edge where opened, slight creasing and browning; a clean copy in the original printed wrappers and glassine wrappers; small loss and tears at foot of spine. £200 A heartfelt history of and rationale for the League of Nations by a student of the law faculty at the University of Paris, submitted for his doctorate just two years after forty-four states signed the League’s Covenant. To those who hoped the League would be an ‘all-powerful goddess’ and found instead a ‘little girl’ taking her first steps, Hodé advises patience. To those who claimed the League was a new tower of Babel built on sand, he replies that its formation is the result of an evolution going back to the dawn of civilisation, and over the next 290 pages he endeavours to prove his thesis. What follows is a chronological gallop through European history identifying precursors to the League, beginning in ancient Greece and moving swiftly through the Pax Romana, medieval Christian Europe under pope and emperor, to the ideas of Pierre Dubois, George of Podebrady̌ , and Francisco Suárez. Having discussed the ‘grand design’ for a Europe of fifteen equal states by the duc de Sully, Hodé describes Emeric Crucé’s Nouveau Cynée as ‘one of the most remarkable precursors of the League of Nations’. Then comes Fénelon, Gottfried Leibniz (‘ardent pioneer of the pacifist idea’) and William Penn, before the author examines the abbé de Saint-Pierre’s project for perpetual peace in Europe and Rousseau’s thoughts thereon. Following Jeremy Bentham comes Immanuel Kant, whose 1796 essay on perpetual peace Hodé quotes at length, concluding that ‘Wilson’s credo is above all a magnificent amplification, a masterly interpretation of Kant’s credo’.