Search Results: Authors starting with P from Alembic Rare Books

London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1931. Duodecimo. Original blue cloth, title to spine gilt, publisher's logo to upper bard in blind. With the dust jacket. Photographic frontispiece, illustrations throughout the text. Ownership inscription dated 1943 to the front free endpaper. Cloth very lightly rubbed at the extremities but otherwise bright and fresh, faint partial toning to the endpapers, faint spotting to the endpapers and edges of text block. An excellent copy in the rubbed and tanned jacket with some spots and marks and an over-price ticket to the spine panel. First UK edition, originally published in the US in the previous year. An attractive copy and uncommon in the jacket. The earliest successful glider was created by the British aeronautical designer Sir George Cayley and flown in 1853, initiating a wave of research into both unpowered and powered flight, and gliders had become relatively sophisticated by the time the Wright Brothers flew the first powered aircraft in 1903. It wasn't until the… Read More

Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office for the United States Department of Agriculture, 1915. Octavo. Original cream wrappers printed in black. 38 plates from photographs. Wrappers faintly toned, mild dampstain affecting the lower corner of the wrappers and text, with some abraded areas where the corners of the leaves have stuck together, not generally affecting text. Very good condition. First edition of this well-illustrated guide to mushroom identification for the amateur collector. The first female mycologist to work at the United States Department of Agriculture, Flora Patterson (1847-1928) exhibited "the tenacity, audacity, and perspicacity of a true scientific visionary" (Reynolds, "Flora Patterson", Women in Microbiology, p. 219). She initially studied fungi as a childhood hobby, then attended several universities as a non-traditional student, taking a plant pathology course at Iowa State and completing her education at Radcliffe College, from where she was able to work in the Harvard… Read More

Baltimore: Quarterly Review of Biology, 1926. 14 page offprint. Original cream wrappers, titles printed to upper wrapper, stapled. Tiny pencil notation to upper wrapper. Wrappers partially toned and a little rubbed and creased, mild creasing of the top corners of the leaves. An excellent copy. The uncommon offprint of the doctoral thesis of entomologist and agricultural chemist Dr. Nellie Maria de Cottrell Payne (1900 - 1990). WorldCat locates only nine copies, mainly in central European institutions, as well as the University of Minnesota, Cornell, and McGill. Payne was born in Colorado and obtained her graduate degrees at Kansas State Agricultural College and the University of Minnesota. Her research encompassed "insect and invertebrate cold hardiness, pigments of hydroids, and the physiology and mathematics of population growth... Following the completion of her doctorate, she was appointed as a National Research Foundation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania until 1927, spending a brief… Read More

New York: Webster Division, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1974. Quarto. Original orange laminate boards printed in green and purple. Colour illustrations throughout. Binding a little rubbed and bumped, mild waviness to text block. A very good copy. First edition. One of the authors of this home economics textbook was the prominent Black nutrition scientist Lenora Moragne (1931-2020) who worked as a hospital dietician before earning her doctorate at Cornell. "With an illustrious career that spanned 60 years, Moragne held positions in hospitals, industry, nutrition publishing, academia and government. Her positions within the federal government include head of nutrition education and training for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service; nutrition coordinator at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and a professional staff member for Sen. Bob Dole (Kan.), specializing in nutrition. She was the first professional female (of any race or ethnic group) to be employed by the… Read More

Madison, WI: the state of Wisconsin, 1898. Octavo. Contemporary library style binding of black half skiver, black cloth sides, spine gilt in compartments. 14 plates of which 2 are chromolithographs and the 12 are lithographs. Binding rubbed with wear at the corners, spine ends, and hinges, contents toned. A very good copy. First edition, first printing of both titles, the "Additional Observations" being a presentation copy inscribed, "Mr, Claus H. Shirum [?], compliments of the authors". Authors Elizabeth and George Peckham were entomologists and archnologists who together pioneered the study of jumping spiders; were early proponents of including behaviour in taxonomical analysis; and performed some of the first studies on sexual selection. Elizabeth was the first female science graduate of Vasser, one of Milwaukee's first librarians, and a suffragist. George obtained a medical degree but chose to teach high school, and in 1880 the Peckhams introduced the first biological laboratory course in an… Read More

London, Brighton, & New York: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1901. Octavo. Original red cloth blocked in gilt and black with an image of a gyroscope on the upper board. Engraved frontispiece and engravings throughout the text. 8 pages of separately paginated publisher's ads at rear. Ink ownership signature of B. G. Davies to the half title, pencilled remark "No! no!!" to the dedication leaf. Spine slightly rolled, lower corner bumped, cloth a little rubbed and marked with some waviness on the spine, contents tanned in the margins. Very good condition. Second edition, first published in 1890. A nice copy of this book which is scarce in all early editions. Copiously illustrated and in the attractive publisher's cloth. Unusually, there is a contemporary pencilled note on the dedication leaf stating "no! no!!" in reference to the printed acknowledgement of Sir William Thomson as "the real author of whatever is worth publication in the following pages". Electrical engineer and mathematician… Read More

China, [circa 1850]. Carved wooden hanging sign (67 x 16 cm). Lacquered and with the original decorative iron handle. Some wear, particularly at the ends and sides, and peeling of the lacquer across the face, some rusting of the iron handle which is still strong. An attractive mid-19th century Chinese pharmacy sign advertising deer musk and turtle-based medications. The wooden sign is carved and lacquered in red and black, and features the original, decorative iron handle.

Neuchâtel: Secrétariat de l'Université, 1939. Octavo. Original grey wrappers printed in black. Text block unopened. Wrappers tanned along the edges and spine, a little creasing at the edges, small chip at the top of the upper wrapper, contents faintly toned in the margins. An excellent copy. First edition of this significant work on set theory, an unopened copy in the original wrappers. Author Sophie Piccard (1904-1990) showed great mathematical ability from an early age. She was born and completed her first undergraduate education in Russia, but fled to Switzerland with her parents in 1925. Piccard then completed a second mathematics degree, and obtained her doctoral dissertation on probability at the University of Lausanne. Following her father's death, she worked as an actuary and then an administrative secretary, but continued doing research, and in 1936 became assistant in geometry to at professor at the University of Neuchâtel. She succeeded to his position in 1938, and from 1943 held… Read More

New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Yale University Press, 1942. Octavo. Original grey wrappers printed in black. Contents unopened. Two mild, vertical creases to the upper wrapper, just a little faint toning along the edges of the wrappers. Excellent condition. An uncommon offprint by noted endocrinologist Grace E. Pickford (1902-1986). An attractive and fresh copy, the contents unopened. Pickford was educated at Cambridge and Yale, and taught at Albertus Magnus College, Yale, and Hiram College. Taking advantage of the Yale Peabody Museum's extensive natural history collections, she became an authority on cephalopod systematics and in 1951 joined the Galathea deep-sea expedition to study rare octopods in the Indo-Malayan region. During the 1940s she began researching the killifish, and it became the organism "on which she established her outstanding work on fish endocrinology. She became interested in the growth rings on fish scales, and the examined effects of the newly… Read More

New York: Pergamon Press, 1959. Octavo. Original burgundy cloth, titles to spine and upper board gilt. With the dust jacket. 3 plates, of which 1 is double-sided. Faint partial toning of the endpapers. An excellent, fresh copy in the jacket that is lightly rubbed along the extremities with light toning of the spine panel. First edition, first printing of this key work by one of Britain's leading biochemists. A beautiful copy in the jacket. Rosalind Pitt-Rivers earned her PhD in biochemistry in 1939 under the supervision of Sir Charles Harington, whose lab at the National Institute for Medical research she then joined. The Second World War interrupted her career, but in 1950 she returned to Harington's lab. "This move turned out to be a propitious event in her scientific career. Inspired by Harington's major interest in elucidating the structure of thyroid hormones, she became deeply involved with biochemical research on how what was then thought to be the only thyroid hormone, L-thyroxine (T4), was… Read More

London: Hutchison, 1959. Octavo. Original grey cloth, title to spine in gilt on red ground, top edge dyed red. With the dust jacket. Facsimile manuscript letters within the text. Bookseller's ticket of H. K. Lewis and Co. Cloth a little toned at the upper edges of the boards, light spotting to the margins and edges of the text block. A very good copy in the jacket which is tanned along the spine and edges with a few small marks and mild creasing at the lower corner. First UK edition, first impression of one of the key texts of the philosophy of science. Originally published in Germany in 1934 as Logik der Forschung, Popper rewrote and republished it in English in 1959. The New York edition of the same year takes precedence, but the UK edition is less common.

New York: a Wiley-Interscience Publication, John Wiley & Sons, 1977. Octavo. Original blue-grey cloth, titles to spine and ISBN on lower board in metallic blue, publisher's device to upper board in blind. With the dust jacket. Diagrams and illustrations throughout the text. Cloth slightly rubbed at the tips, two small worn spots on the edge of the upper board. A very good copy in the jacket that is creased and worn with some closed tears and small chips. First edition first printing. Presentation copy inscribed by Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine, and also signed by co-author Grégoire Nicolis, for fellow physicist Peter Landsberg. Books signed by either Prigogine and Nicolis are uncommon. With a small pencilled notation of Landsberg's on page 34 also repeated with a question mark on the front free endpaper. Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) is today one of the most well-known figures in the field of chaos theory. Though others before him, primarily Lars Onsager, had investigated the thermodynamics of… Read More