Collections

The Library of John Derek Latham

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We are pleased to offer for sale the library of John Derek Latham, Professor Emeritus and the first occupant of the Iraq Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Edinburgh University.  The library comprises 1515 items and is fully listed in our catalogue together with an introduction (available in PDF).

Latham's library is an academic collection of primarily twentieth-century printed books on Andalusia and the Maghreb, Qur'anic studies, linguistics, literature, and other subjects.  Amongst the noteworthy works is a text on the history of Algiers by 'Alī Ridā Pasha, Mir'āt al-Jazā'ir, translated into Ottoman Turkish by 'Ali Sewqi Efendi.  A copy of Abū al-Rabī’ 'Ināyat ūlī al-majd bi-dhikr Āl al-Fāsī Ibn al-Jadd is signed by Muhammad al-Fāsī, onetime Rector of the University of Rabat and a member of the al-Fāsī family.  A 1968 edition of the Qur'an with commentary by A. Y. 'Ali was presented to Latham by Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra, the late Prime Minister of Malaysia; a letter from Putra to Latham is enclosed in the book.  The library also includes uncorrected advance proof copy of Kimche's Palestine or Israel: The untold story of why we failed 1917–1923, 1967–1973. Could the problem of Palestine ever have been solved?, M. M. Rif'at's very rare Lest We Forget: A Page from the History of the English in Egypt (1915) and Ibn al-Muwaqqit's Al-Sa'āda al-abadiyya fī ta'rīf bi-mashāhīr al-hadra al-Marrakushiyya, with his seal and signature.  There are also early print runs of preliminary sections of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, to which Latham was a contributor, and the 1977 Arabic Islamic Bibliography. The Middle East Library Committee Guide based on Giuseppe Gabrielli's Manuale di bibliografia musulmana, which Latham helped to edit.

A collection of Russian emigre literature

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We are pleased to offer a collection of Russian émigré literature, comprising 366 titles published in the years following the Russian Revolution, from different publishing houses in the cities around the world where the Russian diaspora had settled.  Apart from the main centres of Paris and Berlin, the cities represented here from the earliest years of exile are Belgrade, Bordeaux, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Constantinople, Harbin, Helsinki, Hvalstad, ‘Khallein’, Munich, New York, Nice, Novy Sad, Prague, Riga, San Francisco, Shanghai, Sofia, Stockholm, Tallinn (Revel), Tartu (Iur’ev), Tientsin, Uppsala, Vienna, and Warsaw.  Approximately two thirds are first editions.  Many of these were never republished until the fall of the Soviet Union, when interest was renewed in modern Russia.  The majority of the remaining third of the books are first editions printed outside Russia.  The collection is particularly strong in the novel in the Emigration from 1917 to 1940, and also includes a few later novels published in the 1950s, as well as some pre-revolutionary publications, mostly from the Berlin publishing house of J. Ladyschnikow (including first edition of works by Andreev and Gorky), and some unusual revolutionary editions published by Heinrich Caspari. 

Full details available on request.

Economics Library of Peter Newman (1928-2001)

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We are pleased to offer for sale the working library of Peter Newman, Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University 1966-1990, and co-editor of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law. The library comprises 3292 items, including a good number of first or early editions, and is fully listed in our catalogue, with an introduction by Newman's former colleague, Professor Murray Milgate, which is Available in PDF.

‘The collection contains a comprehensive coverage of works in economics of the neo-classical (or modern) school - there is scarcely anything of significance published between the nineteenth century and the present that will not be found in it. While the collection reflects Newman’s professional interest in mathematical and statistical economics, it is of much broader interest. The breadth, of course, reflects Newman’s keen appreciation of the historical development of economics and of the significance of the development of works in cognate disciplines like history, politics and philosophy . . . . [Newman] was a scholar and a bibliophile who worked tirelessly for the discipline simply because he regarded it as important to the betterment of people’s lives. Newman held that economic research could sometimes contribute sharp and fresh understandings of many social problems; and he practised and preached this opinion whenever he had the opportunity’ (Murray Milgate).

Born in Mitcham, Surrey, in 1928, Newman attended the University of London, then worked on research projects at Oxford, and for the UK Government and the UN. In 1959 he took up a post at the University of Michigan, moving to Johns Hopkins seven years later. The Theory of Exchange (1965) brought him widespread public attention, for ‘while at the cutting edge of mathematical economics, it was also written with a deep sense of the history of the subject’. At his death in New Zealand at the age of 73, Newman was engaged in editing the work of F. Y. Edgeworth, for whom he had a long-standing admiration, now published by Oxford University Press as F. Y. Edgeworth’s Mathematical Physics and Further Papers on Political Economy (2003).

The Wittgenstein–Hänsel Correspondence

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‘… I hear from Russell that my thing should have already appeared. Can you ask in a bookshop for the latest number of the Annalen der Naturphilosophie? It should be there’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein to Ludwig Hänsel, regarding the publication of the Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, January 1922).

One of 115 autograph letters from the largest collection of Wittgenstein letters to remain in private hands. It is also the largest collection of extant Wittgenstein letters written to a single correspondent. Begun a month after Wittgenstein’s release, aged 30, as a prisoner-of-war and ending only with his death 32 years later, it spans the whole second half of the philosopher’s life, including the publication of the Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, the years spent as a primary school teacher in Austria, and his subsequent return to philosophy at Cambridge.

Full details available on request.