Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. New York: Harper, 1851

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. “Moby Dick is a story of the sea … Moby-Dick is a portrait of the whale” (Lewis Mumford). As late as May of 1850 Melville described this first Moby-Dick as “the Whaling voyage” in a letter to Richard Henry Dana:  “It will be a strange sort of book, I fear, blubber is blubber you know; tho you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree & to cook the thing up one needs throw in a little fancy. The descriptions are the finest, most accurate and entertaining of any narrative of sea life that has ever been published.” 

$25,000

Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: University Press, 1910, 1927

FIRST EDITION of vol. 1, second editions of vols. 2-3, in the rare dust jackets.

One of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of science, this work uses a complex new symbolic system in an attempt to prove the logical basis of mathematics from a small set of axioms and the principles of logic. The Principia Mathematica is “the greatest single contribution to logic that has appeared in the two thousand years since Aristotle” (DSB).

$20,000

Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854

FIRST EDITION. A handsome copy of Walden, published in an edition of 2000 copies.

$18,000

Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854

$17,500

General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London, 1936

FIRST EDITION of this classic of modern economics, “on which his fame as the outstanding economist of his generation must rest” (DNB). World-wide depression induced Keynes to re-examine classical approaches to economics. Urging the use of a national budget as a principal instrument of the planning of the national economy, Keynes placed responsibility for regulation of the economy squarely in the hands of the government.

$15,500

Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, life among the lowly. Boston: Jewett, 1852

FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING. “These books are of such paramount historical importance that it is difficult to evaluate them as literature” (Merle Johnson). “Three thousand copies were sold on the day of publication, and before its first anniversary, over 300,000 copies were sold in America … More than twenty London editions appeared in 1852, so the English audience must have been as large as the American. No other American novel has been translated into so many foreign languages” (Grolier/American).

$15,000

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade).. New York: Webster, 1885

A lovely copy of Huckleberry Finn.

$15,000

On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: John Murray, 1860

SECOND EDITION, published on January 7, 1860, less than two months after the first edition. Three thousand copies were printed. On the Origin of Species is “certainly the greatest biological book ever written” (Freeman) and “the most important single work in science” (Dibner).

$14,000

Psychopathia Sexualis. Eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1886

FIRST EDITION of the founding work of sexology. “Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing is primarily known as the founding father of sexology. His Psychopathia Sexualis is widely accepted to be the foundational work for the scientific study of human sexuality, a field still in its infancy at the end of the nineteenth century. Psychopathia Sexualis offers an overview of both sexological physiology and psychology and is of groundbreaking importance for the origin of the modern scientific research domain of sexological pathology as an autonomous discipline.”

$12,500

The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise. London: Macmillan, 1869

First edition of “one of the finest scientific travel books ever written.”

$11,000