recounts time spent at Glen Gelder Shiel while anxiously awaiting news of the Battle of Tel El Kebir (p. 399). Lady Southampton was close with Queen Victoria and particularly so with Princess Beatrice. A series of 22 intimate autograph letters from Victoria to Lady Southampton was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in 1962. Dated between June 1878 and March 1899 and addressed to “Dearest Ismay”, they were described as including “characteristic passages of self-revelation”, most notably reflections on her depression following the death of John Brown. A single letter that surfaced in 2014 was similarly candid in nature, wherein Victoria sympathized with Lady Southampton: “I cannot go to bed without saying how truly, deeply I feel you, a widow myself & like me without at the present moment at least, anyone to turn to for help or advice” (28 February 1884). We have traced one copy only of the privately printed edition institutionally, at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, inscribed by Victoria to Empress Eugénie. The copy at Worcester Public Library, Massachusetts (although listed by WorldCat as being of the privately printed edition) is in fact of the regular trade edition, published by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1884. More Leaves followed the success of Leaves from a Journal of our Life in the Highlands (1868): both were published as a memorial to Albert following his death, and to compensate for the Queen’s withdrawal from public life while in mourning. Octavo. Original dark green sand-grain cloth over bevelled boards, spine lettered and ruled in gilt, front cover lettered in gilt and with large gilt stamp of a Douglas fir, rear cover with small gilt stamp of a sprig of Highland flowers, blue- grey foliate patterned endpapers, Burn & Co. binder’s ticket on rear pastedown. Together 13 plates, all with tissue guards: engraved portrait frontispiece of Queen Victoria, 7 similar portraits, 2 portraits of her dogs Sharp and Noble, and 3 landscape views. Letterpress printed within decorative ruled borders. Spine with slight lean, ends and corners bumped and gently rubbed, two small splits to cloth along front joint, frontispiece fore edge a little curled and soiled, discreet repair to rear inner hinge, contents crisp and clean. A very good copy, the gilt-stamped covers especially bright. ¶ Victor Mallet, ed., Life with Queen Victoria: Marie Mallet’s letters from Court 1887–1901 , 1968. £4,500 [160023] 163 VIRGIL; CATALLUS. The Bucolics; Odes to Lesbia and the Nuptial Song of Peleus and Thetis. Philadelphia: Printed for subscribers only by George Barrie & Son, 1902
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166 WATTS, Alan. The Way of Zen. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957 First edition cloth issue, of Watt’s seminal book that introduced Zen to Western readers. The cloth issue is scarce, especially in collectable condition. Octavo. Original black cloth, spine and front lettered in gilt. With dust jacket. Discreet ownership stamp to front pastedown. An excellent copy, with the jacket exceptionally smart, only a little mild toning, price-clipped. £750 [155412]
Limited edition, number 547 of 1,000 copies, all printed on japon, with the original Latin parallel with the English translations, within architectural borders; a very attractive book, handsomely bound and elegantly printed. The volume was published as part of the series “Antique Gems from the Greek and Latin”, covering many classical writers, here collecting Virgil’s Bucolics with Catallus’s Odes to Lesbia, and the Nuptial Song of Peleus and Thetis. Octavo (211 × 134 mm). Original red morocco by Barrie, spine lettered in gilt with gilt theatrical motifs to compartments, double gilt fillet to covers, elaborate red and brown morocco doublures richly gilt, red moiré cloth endpapers, gilt edges. With numerous vignettes, some coloured. A fine copy. £400 [145100] 164 WARHOL, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again). New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975 First edition, inscribed by the artist on the half-title, “To George Schaedler, Andy Warhol”, with a drawing by him of a Campbell’s Soup Can, also initialled. Octavo. Original orange cloth-backed yellow paper boards, titles to spine in white and black, the artist’s initials in black to lower corner of front board, black endpapers. With dust jacket. Corners and rear lower edge a trifle bumped, the binding otherwise firm and vibrant, internally crisp. A near- fine copy in the very good jacket, corners rubbed, slight
creasing and small closed tear to rear panel, small crease to front flap, bright, not price-clipped. £1,750 [146178] 165 WANG, Hao. A Variant to Turing’s Theory of Computing Machines. Reprinted from Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. Volume 4, Number 1, January Original offprint of the paper introducing “the first formulation of Turing-machine theory in terms of computer-like models” (Minsky, p. 200), by the Chinese-American logician Hao Wang (1921–1995). In this paper Wang intends “to offer a theory which is closely related to Turing’s but is more economical in the basic operations” (p. 63). Remembered as “a logician who sought a way to link mathematics to philosophy” ( NYT ), Wang received degrees from the National Southwestern Associated University and Tsinghua University in China before moving to the US to study logic under W. V. Quine at Harvard. After time spent at Oxford as the John Locke lecturer in philosophy, he served on the faculty of Harvard and Rockefeller University. He was also a close friend of Kurt Gödel and a founding president of the Gödel Society in Vienna. “His early mathematical achievements contributed 1957. Printed in the U.S.A., 1957 simplifying the turing machine
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162 VICTORIA, Queen. More Leaves from the Journal of A Life in the Highlands, from 1862 to 1882. [London:] printed for strictly private circulation, 1883 scarce privately circulated edition, presented to one of the queen’s personal attendants Rare privately printed edition, presentation copy, inscribed in ink on the preliminary blank, “To dear Lady Southampton from her affectionate Victoria R.I. Osborne Feb: 5. 1884”. The recipient was the Dowager Baroness Ismania Catherine FitzRoy, Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria. More Leaves was intended for a small circle of family and friends; Lady Southampton was a close confidant with whom the Queen identified strongly in widowhood. An Irish aristocrat and second wife of Charles FitzRoy, 3rd Baron Southampton, Lady Southampton (née Nugent, 1838–1918) served as Lady of the Bedchamber from 1878 until Queen Victoria’s death in 1901. She makes her appearance in More Leaves in an entry dated 13 September 1882, in which Queen Victoria
to advances in computer science in the 1950s. While working for the International Business Machines Corporation, he discovered a faster way to prove certain kinds of logical truths using computers. He was awarded the Milestone Prize for Automated Theorem Proving for that work in 1983” ( NYT ). He gives his name to Wang tiles and the Wang B-machine, a simple computational model equivalent to the Turing machine. Wang’s 1957 paper is uncommon: we cannot trace copies in commerce, nor institutionally. Octavo. Original pale blue printed wrappers, stapled. Light shelfwear, some faint creasing at upper edge, internally clean. A very good copy. ¶ Marvin Minsky, Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines , 1967; obituary in The New York Times , 17 May 1995, available online. £3,000 [159673]
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All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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