Search Results: Authors starting with C from Alembic Rare Books

London: Fourth Estate, 2000. Octavo. Original brown boards, titles to spine gilt, green endpapers. With the dust jacket. Illustrations throughout the text. Very slight indentation at the head of spine and shallow bump tot edge of the upper board, light spotting to the top edge of the text block. An excellent copy with the jacket, of which the lower edges of the inner flaps are slightly curled from being in a jacket protector. First edition, first impression of this well-received popular history of the discovery and scientific documentation of dinosaur fossils in Britain during the early 19th century, notable for its emphasis on the work of Mary Anning in addition to that of Gideon Mantell, William Buckland, and Richard Owen. Though Anning's work as a fossil collector has been well-known to specialists and historians since the Victorian Era, this volume was an early part of the revival of popular interest in her life which began in 1999 at the 200th anniversary of her birth, and which has continued in… Read More

[England, 1982]. Poster (420mm x 580mm). Professionally mounted, framed and glazed using archival materials. White text and graphic of a missile caught in a spider's web superimposed over a grey and red photograph of the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki. Marker pen notes at the bottom of the poster give contact details and instructions for travelling to the camp by bus from Birmingham. Light creases from old folds into four, some slight surface scuffs. Very good condition. A rare poster advertising Embrace the Base, one of the key mass actions at the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. We have been able to locate only two other copies in institutional collections, at the LSE Women's Library and the Glasgow Women's Library. The Greenham Common protest was established in September of 1981 by the Welsh group Women for Life on Earth, who were opposed to the deployment of nuclear tipped Cruise missiles at the site. What was initially planned as a single march became a permanent protest camp in place until… Read More

London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.,, 1934. Small octavo. Original white paper boards, red cloth backstrip, title to upper board in red, printed paper label to spine. Short pencilled note to the rear free endpaper. Binding a little rubbed and scratched, spine faded, corners slightly bumped, a little spotting to contents. A very good copy. First English language edition, first impression. Originally published as "Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft" in the journal Erkenntnis in 1932. "Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) was one of the best-known philosophers of the twentieth century. Notorious as one of the founders, and perhaps the leading philosophical representative, of the movement known as logical positivism or logical empiricism, he was one of the originators of the new field of philosophy of science and later a leading contributor to semantics and inductive logic" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Science).

New York, Morningside Heights: Columbia University Press, 1949. Octavo. Original blue cloth, titles to spine gilt. 1 double-sided plate, illustrations within the text. Very lightly rubbed at the tips, small blue sink spots on the upper edge of the text block. Excellent condition. Third printing of this influential work, originally published in 1944. From the library of molecular biologist Erwin Chargaff (1905-2002), with this ownership signature in ink on the front free endpaper. Chargaff's work elucidated key concepts about DNA and provided part of the groundwork for Watson and Crick's discovery of its structure. Chargaff's rules, as they are now known, state that the quantities of the four nucleotides are always linked - guanine matching that of cytosine and adenine with thiamine, and that the relative amounts of each vary from species to species. These observations strongly hinted that the nucleotides carried the genetic information (rather than the protein components, as had been thought… Read More

Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to spine in silver. With the dust jacket. 4 double-sided plates from colour photographs, diagrams, charts, and illustrations from black and white photos throughout the text. Excellent condition, with just a single tiny bump to the edge of the upper board and a few small scratches to the dust jacket. First edition, first printing. A superb copy of the first book devoted solely to dinosaur bone histology. Some of the earliest paleontological researchers, including Louis Agassiz and Gideon Mantell, studied the microscopic structure of fossilised bones, but it was not until the 1950s that "the systematic study of archosaur palaeohistology began in earnest with the pioneering studies of Enlow & Brown", who showed that cellular structure was preserved intact in fossils and that it "contained a wealth of information regarding the evolution and function of skeletal tissues in extinct organisms". This was… Read More

New York: Macmillan & Co., 1895. Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to spine and upper board gilt. Portrait frontispiece and 2 plates. Tiny bump to the edge of the upper board, very lightly rubbed at the tips, what may be a tiny spot of dampstain at the extreme corner of the lower board, light spotting to the edges of the text blocks and occasionally the contents. Very good condition, the cloth fresh. First edition of this biographical work on the astronomers William, Caroline, and John Herschel by one of the "great popularisers of science of the Victorian period" (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 270). Copies of The Herschels and Modern Astronomy are uncommon on the market, particularly in such a nice example of the publisher's binding. Agnes Mary Clerke was taught at home by her scholarly parents, and "by the age of eleven she had mastered Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy" (Ogilvie, p. 270). Settling in London in 1877, she pursued a career as a writer, producing a… Read More

London: The Batchworth Press, 1952. Large octavo. Original blue cloth, title to spine gilt. Colour frontispiece and 52 black and white plates. A couple of tiny pencil notes in the margins, leaf of manuscript notes loosely inserted. Spine rolled, cloth lightly rubbed at the extremities. An excellent copy, the contents clean. First edition, first impression of this comprehensive history of chemistry's role in the Industrial Revolution by a professor of chemistry at the University of Aberdeen. A very nice copy.

Philadelphia: Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences, 1905. Folio. Blue cloth library binding, blue morocco title label to spine. 12 plates of which 5 are colour lithographs. Ownership signature of E. W. MacBride to the front free endpaper. Library call numbers to tail of spine in white, Imperial College Library bookplates, bar code ticket, and lending card to the front endpapers with withdrawn stamps, library ink stamps to both sides of the title leaf. Cloth scuffed and marked with some worn areas along the joints and at the ends of the spine, title page toned, occasional light spots and marks to contents. Very good condition. First edition, first printing of a foundational work in embryology. This copy from the library of marine biologist Ernest William MacBride, who donated it to Imperial College Library, from which it was officially withdrawn. Rare in commerce. Though he considered a religious career, Edward Grant Conklin's (1863-1952) "burning interest was in biology, and he decided to… Read More

London: Chappuis, [between 1859 and 1871]. Cabinet card (103 x 62 mm). Photographer's ticket to the verso. Just a couple of tiny spots. Excellent condition. A lovely carte de visite depicting the Crystal Palace in its permanent home at Sydenham sometime after 1856, when the Brunel water towers, one of which is visible in the photo, were erected. The structure was originally built to house the Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations (the Great Exhibition) in Hyde Park in 1851. Popular acclaim saw it preserved and reopened in Sydenham in 1854, but it was destroyed by a fire in 1936. This card bears the ticket of photographer Paul Emile Chappuis (1816-1887), whose Fleet Street studio operated between 1859 and 1871. Chappuis was also an inventor who held several patents on reflectors that would allow light into buildings that would otherwise require gaslights during the day. The firm that he set up to manufacture them was in operation until the Second World War.

Chicago: the Hollister Press for the Mead Cycle Company, [early 20th-century]. 12 page advertising booklet, stapled self-wraps. Colour and two-tone chromolithographs. 2 horizontal creases from folding, some spotting and dulling to the cover. Very good condition. An attractive, early 20th-century advertising booklet for Crusader Bicycles by the Mead Cycle Company of Chicago. It includes two wonderful chromolithographs, including a double page spread depicting the Advance Model Crusader de Luxe for $19.85 and the Crusader Coaster-Brake Special for $17.80. The upper cover advertises their policies, including free shipping, a free 30 day trial, and five year guarantee, and there are also ads for a variety of accessories. "What more do you want in a wheel? What greater assurance could you ask in buying a bicycle? We are putting our priceless reputation behind these two latest Crusader Models and behind the unqualified statement that when you buy one you are making the best bicycle selection and the wisest… Read More