of the “three furies” of the American libertarian movement, alongside Ayn Rand and Rose Wilder Lane (William F. Buckley Jr. quoted by Burns, p. 746). Her biographer Stephen Cox describes her as “the earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today”. Rand, a disciple and one-time protegé of hers, believed that Paterson’s best-known work, The God of the Machine (1943), published the same year as Rand’s The Fountainhead , was “a document that could literally save the world – if enough people knew of it and read it. [It] does for capitalism what the Bible did for Christianity – and, forgive the comparison, what Das Kapital did for Communism or Mein Kampf for Nazism. It takes a book to save or destroy the world” (letter of 28 November 1943, in Berliner). Paterson and Rand were introduced by a mutual acquaintance in 1940, and quickly became friends and political allies. “The contrasting approaches to ideas evident in their letters seem also to have characterized their conversations – Rand organized and logical; Paterson spontaneous and sometimes rambling. Rand later said of Paterson ‘. . . At her best, she was enormously rational, with a very wide kind of abstract mind, could talk fascinatingly, make the best philosophical identifications and abstract connections. And generally was a marvelous mind . . . At her worst, she would turn into a mystic’” (Berliner). Their relationship deteriorated in 1948, after Paterson insulted several of Rand’s friends. If It Prove Fair Weather was Paterson’s final novel. “Paterson contrives the kind of situation that allows her to study the basic moral and psychological dilemmas that she regards as typical of intimate relationships. Of her chief male character, Paterson remarked that ‘there was no way for him to behave well. He had only a choice of behaving badly in different ways’” (Cox, introduction to the 2009 edition of The God of the Machine , pp. xxi–xxii). Octavo. Original dark orange cloth, spine and front cover lettered and blocked in gilt and black. With pictorial dust jacket. Lean to spine, ends gently bruised, faint discolouration along fore edges of a few preliminary leaves, contents clean; jacket bright and unclipped (priced $2.50), chipped and creased at extremities, several tears neatly stabilised with tape on verso. A near-fine copy in a very good dust jacket. ¶ Michael S. Berliner, ed., Letters of Ayn Rand , 1997, available online; Jennifer Burns, “The Three ‘Furies’ of Libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand”, Journal of American History , Vol. 102, Issue 3, Dec. 2015, pp. 746–74; Stephen D. Cox, The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America , 2004. £6,750 [156714]
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that has often been altered or lost. The firm’s popular views of Paris and of the Exposition Universelle of 1900 were issued in albums of mounted albumen prints and published in photogravure, often following a fixed order of subjects. Through these images, as well as their panoramic cityscapes and their controversial figure studies from the North African colonies, Neurdein Frères made a significant contribution to the photographic record of their time” (Donald Rosenthal in Hannavy, p. 992). Landscape quarto (175 × 245 mm). Original red half morocco, front cover neatly rejointed, decorative gilt spine, red pebble- grain cloth sides, front cover lettered in gilt, sides and corners trimmed with paired gilt fillets, burgundy and gilt foliate- pattern endpapers, linen hinges, gilt edges. 50 original albumen print photographs (92 x 120 mm) numbered in the negative and with matching number printed below, mounted back-to-back on heavy cardstock leaves (239 × 179 mm), each with printed captions in red and blue above and below the image, decoratively-framed. Slightly rubbed, some wear to corners, very slight toning to margins of mount leaves, still an excellent exemplar. ¶ John Hannavy, ed., E ncyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography , 2008. £2,500 [148725] 129 PARKER, Charlie – WATTS, Charlie. Ode to a Highflying Bird. London: Beat Publications Ltd, [1965] “Flown but not forgotten”
Scarce first edition of the Rolling Stones’ drummer’s lightly humorous but entirely sincere tribute, in the style of a children’s book, to his great hero Charlie Parker, “who made me what I am”. Published on the tenth anniversary of Bird’s death, it was originally conceived as a class project while Watts was a design student. With typical humility he described the book as “compiled by one charlie [ sic ] to a late and great Charlie”. Small octavo. Original white boards, black lettering to covers, portrait of the author on rear cover. Illustrations in colour throughout by the author. Superficial splits to rear joint but sound, covers soiled, couple of faint ring marks to rear cover, contents slightly foxed. A very good copy. £1,000 [155729] 130 PATERSON, Isabel. If It Prove Fair Weather. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940 Inscribed to Ayn Rand First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Ayn Rand from Isabel Paterson / ‘Because he was himself, because I was myself.’ M. de M.” This copy connects two prominent figures in American libertarianism, and dates from the earliest years of their association. Paterson closes with a famous quotation from Montaigne’s essay on friendship. A leading Canadian-American journalist and literary critic, Paterson (1886–1961) is counted one
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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