Search Results: Authors starting with V from The Manhattan Rare Book Company

Philidelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1845. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. FIRST EDITION, LEONARD GALE'S COPY, of perhaps the most important book documenting the earliest history of telegraphy. Gale's work with Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail was critical to the success of the telegraph. With Gale's ownership signature on title page and front pastedown. On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse famously sent the world's first telegraphic message: "What Hath God Wrought" from the Rotunda of the United States Capitol Building in Washington, DC to Baltimore, MD. On the other end of this transmission was Alfred Vail, the lesser known, but equally important inventor of the telegraph. Vail's contributions vastly improved upon Morse's design and were critical to the telegraph's success. Published in 1845, one year following the aforementioned successful telegraphic test, Vail's The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph describes in detail the workings of the device and its applications as well as the history of… Read More

Florence: Giunti, 1568. 2nd Edition. Hardcover. Fine. FIRST COMPLETE, FIRST ILLUSTRATED, AND MOST SOUGHT AFTER EDITION OF THE FIRST MODERN HISTORY OF ART. [The Second Edition overall.] An exceptional copy, very handsomely bound. Vasari's "book contains the biographies of Italian painters, etc. from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. They are based on earlier written and printed sources, on oral accounts, on his knowledge of works of art and his own collection of large drawings. Vasari traveled extensively to collect personal information, meeting most of the artists of his time... Michelangelo was his great hero. The Lives are freely laced with stories and anecdotes, some of which are certainly apocryphal... Vasari's excellent sense of narrative, however, and lively style combined with his wide personal acquaintance makes his 'Lives' a vital contribution to our understanding of the character and psychology of the great artists of the Renaissance, a term ('rinascita') which he was the first… Read More

Easton, PA and Washington, DC: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 1932. First edition. Original wrappers. Very Good. IMPORTANT PAPERS - IN BOTH OFFPRINT AND JOURNAL FORMATS - RELATED TO VON NEUMANN'S PROOF OF THE ERGODIC THEOREM, A FUNDAMENTAL CONTRIBUTION TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF STATISTICAL MECHANICS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. In 1877 the great physicist Ludwig Boltzmann published a paper that sought to explain why systems tend toward maximum-entropy equilibrium states as predicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The conceptual essence of the 1877 paper was this: a system - say, a gas in a container - can exist in any of an inconceivably large number of "states," each differing from all others in the precise position or velocity of at least one molecule. In modern terminology, each such distinguishable disposition of the molecules of a physical system is called a "microstate". But enormous numbers of microstates are equivalent in… Read More

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944. First edition. Original cloth, original dust jacket. Very Good/Very Good. FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING OF THE FOUNDATIONAL BOOK ON GAME THEORY. IN OUTSTANDING CONDITION. "Probabilists have studied games of chance since the beginning of probability theory. Strategic games, whose outcome depends on the skill of the participants in choosing a strategy of play, received widespread attention among mathematicians and economists only with the publication in 1944 of the first edition of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior..." (Dimand and Dimand, "The Early History of the Theory of Strategic Games from Waldegrave to Borel", 1992). In subsequent years, "game theory, it may reasonably be claimed, has proved to be one of the more significant scientific contributions of the twentieth century. Albeit haltingly and unevenly, and in a manner quite unforeseeable in 1944 when the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior was… Read More

Indianapolis: n.p., 1945. First edition. Custom folder. Very Good. UNPUBLISHED SHORT STORY, TYPESCRIPT DRAFT; WITH FRAGMENT OF SECOND STORY. These two short stories survive from Kurt Vonnegut's early attempts to become an author, after the end of the Second World War in 1945 and years before the publication of his first piece of fiction, yet alone novel, in 1950. The period between Kurt Vonnegut's return from war-torn Europe and the publication of his first piece of fiction "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" in 1950 is replete with rejected short stories by the fledging fiction writer. And the two unpublished stories present here could easily sit themselves among the numerous works from this unhappy time in Vonnegut's early adulthood which have only posthumously received public attention. However, the Indianapolis address given at the bottom of "One for 'A'" helps to locate the story to a narrow timeframe after the war but before Kurt and his newly-wed wife Jane commenced their graduate studies at… Read More

np: np, 1930. First edition. Custom box. Very Good. RARE AND REVEALING COLLECTION OF FAMILY LETTERS WRITTEN BY KURT VONNEGUT. This collection of 12 letters, most of which are addressed to Vonnegut's father, brother (Bernard), sister-in-law (Bow), and family as a whole, chronicle the life, rise, and development of one of America's most beloved writers. Taken together, these letters - in which he begins to test the possibilities of a career in writing - are a unique glimpse into Vonnegut's psychic and writerly interior, and bubble with the experimentality, imagination, and distinctive prose that would define Vonnegut's most famous works in the decades to follow. Housed together in handsome archival case. II. Letters 1-2: EARLY LIFE (Early 1930s) "Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation" (Dinitia Smith, New York Times).… Read More