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).
‘… 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.
Description available here
