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

New York: Hollander Workshop. 1st Edition. No Binding. Fine. ORIGINAL LITHOGRAPH BY ROBERT MOTHERWELL, one of only 100 signed and numbered by Motherwell. "For this series, one of many works with a Spanish theme, Motherwell recalled an experience he had while honeymooning in Madrid with Helen Frankenthaler in 1958. He had pinned drawing paper on the hotel walls and like the way the texture of the wall transferred itself to the sheets as he drew. To re-create this experience, Motherwell taped transfer paper to the spackled walls of [printer Irwin] Hollander's studio and rubbed the sheets with lithographic crayons to achieve the desired transfer of texture" (Wye and Figura, Artists & Prints: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art). As Motherwell's printer and collaborator Hollander later explained: "These are rubbings! . . . a transfer of feeling from Madrid to Tenth Street. So by putting a French transfer paper on the wall and taping it, he could take litho crayons… Read More

New York: Hollander Workshop. 1st Edition. No Binding. Fine. ORIGINAL LITHOGRAPH BY ROBERT MOTHERWELL, one of only 100 signed and numbered by Motherwell. "For this series, one of many works with a Spanish theme, Motherwell recalled an experience he had while honeymooning in Madrid with Helen Frankenthaler in 1958. He had pinned drawing paper on the hotel walls and like the way the texture of the wall transferred itself to the sheets as he drew. To re-create this experience, Motherwell taped transfer paper to the spackled walls of [printer Irwin] Hollander's studio and rubbed the sheets with lithographic crayons to achieve the desired transfer of texture" (Wye and Figura, Artists & Prints: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art). As Motherwell's printer and collaborator Hollander later explained: "These are rubbings!... [A] transfer of feeling from Madrid to Tenth Street. So by putting a French transfer paper on the wall and taping it, he could take litho crayons and… Read More

New York: Hollander Workshop. 1st Edition. No Binding. Fine. ORIGINAL LITHOGRAPH BY ROBERT MOTHERWELL, one of only 100 signed and numbered by Motherwell. "For this series, one of many works with a Spanish theme, Motherwell recalled an experience he had while honeymooning in Madrid with Helen Frankenthaler in 1958. He had pinned drawing paper on the hotel walls and like the way the texture of the wall transferred itself to the sheets as he drew. To re-create this experience, Motherwell taped transfer paper to the spackled walls of [printer Irwin] Hollander's studio and rubbed the sheets with lithographic crayons to achieve the desired transfer of texture" (Wye and Figura, Artists & Prints: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art). As Motherwell's printer and collaborator Hollander later explained: "These are rubbings!... [A] transfer of feeling from Madrid to Tenth Street. So by putting a French transfer paper on the wall and taping it, he could take litho crayons and… Read More

New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924. First edition. Original cloth. Very Good. FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED AND TWICE SIGNED BY HOUDINI: "To Frederick H Young / Best wishes / Houdini / Sept 19. - 1924 / 1:30 AM." Additionally signed "Houdini" on dedication page. Harry Houdini, the son of a rabbi and a doting mother, was born Erik Weisz in Budapest, Hungary in 1874. After moving to Wisconsin at age 4 then to New York City at 13, Erik Weisz eventually became the legendary Harry Houdini, a master mystifier now remembered for his sensational escapes but known in his time as an unmasker of frauds. When Houdini's mother died in 1913 he lamented, "it was a shock from which I do not think recovery is possible." Her death led to Harry's interest in Spiritualism, a religious movement based on the belief that the dead could interact with the living, and he dedicated his book, A Magician Among the Spirits, to her. Harry Houdini met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1920 and they corresponded regularly about their mutual… Read More

First edition. Decorated leather. Fine. ONE OF ONLY SIX COPIES ON HANDMADE JAPON NACRÉ. SIGNED BY BOTH HUGNET AND DUCHAMP. Georges Hugnet, poet, graphic artist, publisher and historian of the surrealist movement, was inspired by Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and other members of the Parisian avant-garde. Hugnet's first collection of poems and collages, published in 1936 and entitled La septième face du dé (The seventh face of the die), included a cover designed by Duchamp. Hugnet so admired Duchamp and his work that he penned a poem called, Marcel Duchamp, which pays tribute to Duchamp's contributions to modern art. In this poem Hugnet celebrates Duchamp's innovative spirit, his unconventional ideas about the nature and purpose of art, and his use of found objects and readymades and references several of Duchamp's most famous works, which were seen as radical and controversial in their time. We have on offer Hugnet's poem, Marcel Duchamp, published in 1941 and signed by… Read More

New York: Harper & Brothers. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Fine. FIRST AMERICAN EDITION of Melville's third book, containing the first glimpses of the rich symbolism and allegorical style that would later be more fully developed in Moby Dick. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849. Octavo, original brown blind-stamped cloth. Two volumes. Provenance: with bookplates of Albert Henry Wiggin, the noted book collector and famous Boston and New York banker who was considered for Time's Man of the Year for 1930 for his work during the Depression; also with attractive bookplates of Sydney Ansell Gimson and Fowler Booksellers. Very light wear at spine ends, usual scattered occasional foxing, pastedowns toned and foxed. Cloth very clean and gilt exceptionally bright: a beautiful copy.

Los Angeles: 7410 Publishing Company, 1990. First edition. Original box. Very Good. LIMITED DELUXE EDITION PHOTO-BOOK DOCUMENTING THE PUBLIC RESPONSE TO THE DEATH OF MARILYN MONROE; WITH TWO SIGNED ORIGINAL PRINTS; COPY A OUT OF ONLY 26 LETTERED COPIES. Front-page news across the US and Europe, the death of Marilyn Monroe on Saturday, 4 August 1962 shocked all who had come to know and love the star over her dramatic rise to fame in the proceeding decade. Just as Monroe has captured the public's imagination in her lifetime, her unexpected passing launched a flurry of media attention, riddled with everything from conspiracy theories involving the Kennedys to critiques of ever-invasive paparazzi. Photojournalist Leigh Wiener (1926-1993) was there the morning of Sunday, 5 August, on assignment for Life Magazine to cover the unfolding dramatic aftermath. In his career, Wiener documented a wide array of public and private events featuring celebrities of all walks of life including every US President from… Read More

Lancaster and New York: American Physical Society, 1950. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Very Good. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS of Feynman's paper providing a rigorous justification and proof for his famous "Feynman diagrams" and "Feynman rules". "Nobody but Dick [Feynman] could use his theory, because he was always invoking his intuition to make up the rules of the game as he went along. Until the rules were codified and made mathematically precise, I could not call it a theory" (Freeman Dyson, quoted in David Kaiser, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science). Particle Physics: One Hundred Years of Discoveries: "Mathematical proof of the validity of the Feynman rules for calculations of amplitudes in QED. Nobel Prize to R.P. Feynman awarded in 1965." IN: The Physical Review, Volume 80, Second Series, Number 3, November 1, 1950, pp. 440-457. Lancaster, PA and New York: for the American Physical Society, 1950. Quarto, original wrappers. A nearly invisible spot of dampstaining on the extreme outer edge… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, The Physical Review, 1950. FIRST EDITION OFFPRINTS. Original wrappers. Very Good. EXTREMELY RARE OFFPRINTS OF FEYNMAN'S FINAL TWO PAPERS ON QUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS, DESCRIBING THE MATHEMATICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR HIS PATH-INTEGRALS AND FEYNMAN DIAGRAMS. Feynman himself stated about these papers: "In these two papers, I put everything that I had done and thought should be published on the subject [i.e., quantum electrodynamics]. And that was the end of my published work in this field" (quoted in Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum, p. 325). We are not aware of any other offprints of any of Feynman's papers on quantum electrodynamics having appeared on the market; no copies on OCLC. "While Feynman made many original and imaginative contributions to theoretical physics, it may well be that his place in the history of science will be largely based on his approach to renormalizing quantum electrodynamics, and especially on the tools that he invented to accomplish that… Read More

London: W. Richardson, J. Phillips, W. Pennington. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE IN ORIGINAL BOARDS of Dalton's first book; one of the foundational works in meteorology. "In 1793 Dalton moved to Manchester to teach mathematics at a dissenting academy, the New College. He took with him the proof sheets of his first book, a collection of essays on meteorologic topics based on his own observations together with those of his friends John Gough and Peter Crosthwaite. This work, Meteorological Observations and Essays, was published in 1793. It created little stir at first but contained original ideas that, together with Dalton's more developed articles, marked the transition of meteorology from a topic of general folklore to a serious scientific pursuit" (Britannica). His book "contained not only a record of his unremitting observations but also inferences of the causes of the meteorological phenomena so exposed. These reflections, which… Read More

Budapest: Athenaeum, 1929. First edition. Original cloth. Very Good. THE RARE FIRST EDITION OF THE BOOK THAT INTRODUCED THE IDEA OF "SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION" AS A FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTIC OF SOCIAL NETWORKS. One of the key characteristics of social networks is what is known as the "small world phenomenon" - the idea that every individual can be linked to every other individual through a relatively short chain of acquaintance relationships. "[T]he first significant empirical study of [the phenomenon] was undertaken by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who asked randomly chosen 'starter individuals' to each try forwarding a letter to a designated 'target' person living in the town of Sharon, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston... Roughly a third of the letters eventually arrived at the target, in a median of six steps, and this has since served as basic experimental evidence for the existence of short paths in the global friendship network, linking all (or almost all) of us together in… Read More

London: Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1712. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. FIRST EDITION, containing the FIRST APPEARANCE of Pope's The Rape of the Lock. "The earliest version of Pope's mock heroic poem The Rape of the Lock, composed in a fortnight during summer 1711, had for nine months been anonymously printed in Bernard Lintot's Miscellany. The masterpiece of Pope's earlier period, The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714) had its origin in a quarrel between two Catholic families, apparently over the provocative cutting off of a lock of hair by Lord Petre from the head of Arabella Fermor... "The poem... is far from being a mere social satire in which a trivial quarrel is mocked by being presented in epic terms. Indeed, by the time the poem has been thoughtfully read it is not really clear that the quarrel is trivial. The 'Heroi-Comical' in Pope's hands is a volatile mixture: some of its comedy rebounds on the epic conventions that are primarily deployed to mock the foolish and vain. In the shining… Read More

np: np, 1908. First edition. Framed. Very Good. ORIGINAL, HISTORICALLY IMPORTANT DRAWING OF THE YOUNG VIRGINIA STEPHEN BY FRANCIS DODD. DODD'S WORK FROM HIS 1907-1908 SITTINGS WITH WOOLF ARE THE ONLY EXTANT LIKENESSES OF HER FROM THIS PERIOD. FROM THE BENJAMIN SONNENBERG COLLECTION. Virginia Woolf famously hated being an artist's subject. According to her nephew Quentin Bell, "one of the things she most disliked in life was being peered at. A very few friends had been allowed to make pictures; some were made by stealth." We have, therefore, very few surviving images from artists of Woolf, and Dodd's work from 1907-1908 are the only extant artist portraits of her in the early years of her work on her first novel The Voyage Out and were the only artist likenesses of Woolf made prior to Duncan Grant's painting of her of 1911 (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). At the time of her 1907-1908 sitting with the artist Francis Dodd, Woolf was not yet a famous writer (The Voyage Out would not… Read More

Paris: Mallet-Bachelier, 1862. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Fine. FIRST EDITION of De Chancourtois's presentation of his "telluric screw," the first periodic representation of the elements; precedes Mendeleev's table by seven years. "In 1862, De Chancourtois arranged the elements according to what he termed increasing 'numbers' along a spiral. These numbers were written along a vertical line that served to generate a vertical cylinder... The first full turn of the spiral ended with the element oxygen, and the second full turn was completed at sulfur. Periodic relationships, or chemical groupings, could be seen in De Chancourtois's... by moving vertically downward along the surface of the cylinder. The eighth such turn, and coincidentally the halfway point down the cylinder, occurred at tellurium. This rather arbitrary feature provided De Chancourtois with the name of vis tellurique, or telluric screw, for his system. This name may also have been chosen by De Chancourtois from tellos, Greek for earth,… Read More

Ossining: np. 1st Edition. No Binding. Fine. Typescript Signed, an essay titled Music as an Aspect of the Human Spirit, written by the composer for Columbia University's bicentennial celebration. Signed on the last page. 11 1/4 pages, twelve 4to sheets. [Ossining?], circa 1954. An annotated typed draft of the same work is located in the Copland Papers at the Library of Congress.