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151 PLATH, Sylvia. Ariel. London: Faber and Faber, 1965 GOD’S LIONESS First edition. Ariel is Plath’s most enduring poetry book, published two years after her suicide. The collection was edited by Ted Hughes and has an introduction by Robert Lowell. Plath believed her Ariel poems to be the best she had produced, “announcing to her mother that ‘they will make my name’” ( ODNB ). Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With dust jacket. Slight lean to spine, a little foxing to edges and rear endpapers, light marks to top and fore edges, contents unaffected. A very good copy indeed, in like dust jacket, not price-clipped, spine a little faded, a few light marks, else bright. ¶ Tabor A5a. £1,350 [150680] 152 POLLOCK, Jackson. A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1978–95 First editions. The complete catalogue raisonné of Pollock’s works, including a biography, edited by Francis Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw. 5 volumes, quarto. Original cream cloth, titles to front cover in black, titles to spine gilt on a black ground. First four volumes housed together in a black slipcase, fifth volume
and the work was published in Vienna Circle’s series Schriften zur Wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung. Octavo. Original printed wrappers. Slight soiling to wrappers, a few early ink and pencil annotations in German, contents otherwise clean. A very good copy. £3,750 [151608] 154 POPPER, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd, 1945 HIS INFLUENTIAL FIRST BOOK First edition of Popper’s first work in English, and his greatest and most influential. “ The Open Society was, deservedly, a great success; and so was its author. It appeared in November 1945, and Popper arrived the following January [from New Zealand] to find himself a rising star in the British philosophical firmament . . . The ‘open society’ had obvious affinities with what John Stuart Mill had argued for in On Liberty : a society in which argument was the norm, where moral, political, scientific, and religious doctrines were constantly questioned and revised. What was unusual about The Open Society and its Enemies was not only its sustained assault on the enemies of the open society but its concentration on the way in which their philosophical errors became politically dangerous. Volume 1 depicted Plato as both a proto-communist and a proto-fascist,
housed in a burgundy slipcase. Almost all 1,096 works are illustrated in black and white, with 45 reproduced in colour. All fine in slipcases. £2,000 [152167] 153 POPPER, Karl. Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft. Vienna: Julius Springer, 1935 BLACK SWANS First edition of the author’s first book, one of the most important philosophical books of the century, known to the English-speaking world as The Logic of Scientific Discovery , though not published in English until 1959. The work had a profound effect on the philosophy of science, and on the methods of practising scientists. Logik der Forschung addressed the problem that preoccupied Popper throughout the rest of his career, that of distinguishing proper science from pseudoscience. His famous answer, which he refined in his later writings, was that scientific theories are distinguished by their falsifiability (with the famous example, that the statement “all swans are white” can be falsified by a single black swan). Consequently, Popper held, psychoanalysis, Marxist historiography and transcendental metaphysics are not genuinely scientific, for there is no way of refuting them. Popper had close connections with the logical positivists,
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