Results 25 - 32 of 36 results

Life and Writings of Thomas Paine - Thomas Paine, Daniel Edwin Wheeler (editor)

1908 - Vincent Parke and Company, New York - Independence Edition of the Centenary Issue
These are the times that try men's souls

Elegantly bound ten volume set of the de luxe independence edition, number 166 of just 500 hand-numbered sets signed by the editor Daniel Edwin Wheeler, published to celebrate the centenary of Paine's death.

Included are Paine’s ‘
Common Sense’, ‘The American Crises’, ‘The Rights of Man’, and ‘The Age of Reason’, as well as essays, letters and speeches. Each volume with three photogravure or facsimile plates, as well as a frontispiece, title-pages printed in two colours, autographed limitation leaf to volume one.

‘On January 10, 1776, an obscure immigrant published a small pamphlet that ignited independence in America and shifted the political landscape of the patriot movement from reform within the British imperial system to independence from it. One hundred twenty thousand copies sold in the first three months in a nation of three million people, making
Common Sense the best-selling printed work by a single author in American history up to that time. Never before had a personally written work appealed to all classes of colonists. Never before had a pamphlet been written in an inspiring style so accessible to the “common” folk of America.’ - Jack Miller Center. 
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Price HK$ 35,000



The Masonic Offering, A Gift for All Seasons. Faith, Hope, Charity. - Rev. John Perry, Paschal Donaldson (editors)

1854 - Lamport, New York - First Edition
An ornately bound first edition of thus remarkable book featuring a selection of Masonic stories, histories, poems, and guidance, illustrated with eight full page lithographic pates and wonderful chromolithograph (colour) title page.

Scarce in such nice condition.
 
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Price HK$ 7,500



Temple Bar, or Some Account of ye Marygold, No. 1, Fleet Street - Inscribed - F. G. H. Price

1875 - Printed by Taylor and Francis, London - First Edition
A scarce, fine and inscribed first edition of the history of private banking house of Child & Co., one of the oldest private banks in the United Kingdom, who has traded from No. 1 Fleet Street since 1673, under the ‘Marygold’ sign.

This copy is inscribed from the author, F.G.H. Price to the Marquess of Tavistock, 8th Duke of Bedford, whose family had at that date been banking with Chlid & Co., for two centuries, the first Duke of Bedford opened his account in 1679.
 
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Price HK$ 3,000



The History of the World, in Five Books - Sir Walter Raleigh, John Shirley

1677 - Printed for Robert White, London - Tenth Folio Edition
Magnificently bound folio, the first to contain the additional ‘Life of the Author’. Illustrated with the memorable engraved allegorical frontispiece, engraved portrait of Raleigh, six double page engraved maps, two double page engraved battle plans, three in-text schematics, twenty-six pages of chronological tables, and a title page printed in red and black.

‘Among the noblest of literary enterprises. Throughout it breathes a serious moral purpose. It illustrates the sureness with which ruin overtakes "great conquerors and other troublers of the world" who neglect law, whether human or divine, and it appropriately closes with an apostrophe to death of rarely paralleled sublimity.’

‘Too Saucy in Censuring Princes’ - King James on confiscating all unsold copies and suppressing further sales, several months after publication.

Written whilst imprisoned in the Tower of London from 1603 to 1616 and intended to outline historical events from creation to modern times, drawing on the Bible, Greek mythology, and other sources. Raleigh dedicated it to the young Prince Henry, his patron and supporter who was trying to secure his release from prison. The prince's death in 1612 discouraged Raleigh, and the book ends abruptly with the second Macedonian War instead of continuing through two more volumes as originally intended. Raleigh was released from the Tower in 1616 to lead one final expedition to South America, but his men attacked a Spanish outpost and he was executed upon his return in 1618.
 
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Price HK$ 25,000



1923-6 - Charles Scribner's Sons, New York - The National Edition
A finely bound twenty volume set of Roosevelt’s works. With additional notes to the beginning of each volume, sometimes biographical sometimes Roosevelt’s own notes.

Roosevelt was an historian, a biographer, a statesman, a hunter, a naturalist, and an orator. His prodigious literary output includes twenty-six books, over a thousand magazine articles, thousands of speeches and letters. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1906, in his position as President of the United States of America and collaborator of various peace treaties.
 
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Price HK$ 36,000



Baronagium Genealogicum: or the Pedigrees of the English Peers - Sir William Segar, Joseph Edmondson

1764-84 - Engraved and printed for the author, London - First Editions
The most beautifully illustrated and comprehensive record of 18th century Heraldry. A magnificent and extremely rare complete set of six enormous uncut folio volumes, with 658 copperplate engravings (104 of which are double page) many by the master engraver Francesco Bartolozzi a founder member of the Royal Academy. The plates consist of 279 coats-of-arms (3 double-page), 364 genealogical tables (101 double-page), six titles, six dedication pages, and three specific family dedication pages.

Ranked to begin with Royalty, this massive work took 20 years to produce, making it necessary to publish a supplement with new peerages. Provenance - Sir John Smith, Bart., F.R.S. of Sydling St.Nicholas, Dorset, whose initials JS are gilt-stamped to the morocco spine labels and engraved bookplates to the front pastedowns.
 
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Price HK$ 150,000



The Jungle - Upton Sinclair

1906 - Doubleday, New York - First Edition
‘Pierces the thickest skull and most leathery heart.’ - Winston Churchill

‘The brutally grim story of a Slavic family who emigrates to America,
The Jungle tells of their rapid and inexorable descent into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and social and economic despair.

‘Sinclair's nightmarish narrative of the immigrant Rudken family instigated a series of legislative measures that were highly successful. His lurid scenes of a meat packing industry that ground both rates and fingers into sausage aroused the middle class to demand sanitary conditions for food preparation.

Yet far less effective by comparison was his severe indictment of the working conditions that regularly reduced laborers to impoverished insanity. As Sinclair later wryly observed, “
I aimed for the heart and hit the stomach of America”.’ – Emory Elliot, The Columbia Literary History of the United States. 
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Price HK$ 9,400



An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith

1802 - Printed for A. Strahan for T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, London - Tenth edition
A fine three volume set in uncommon contemporary bindings, with the appendix to volume II and a detailed index to volume III.

First ‘published in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence it has been argued that the global effect of Smith’s work has exceeded that of American constitutionalists. And if the wealth of a nation or a people is the foundation of all else, then from Hong Kong and Shanghai to Peru, from the oil and gas fields of Russia to the United States itself, from Estonia to Australia, it can be claimed that the principles and economic dynamics at work in all these places come from a book by a scholar of Scotland published before the French Revolution, before the Industrial Revolution and eighty four years before
Das Kapital by Karl Marx.’ - Melvyn Bragg – 12 Books That Changed the World.

Reputedly stolen by Gypsies at the age of three, Smith grew up to become one of the pillars of the Scottish Enlightenment, winning fame as a moral philosopher as well as an economist. In '
The Wealth of Nations,' Smith laid the intellectual foundations for a liberal free-market society, and in so doing revolutionised the understanding of how societies, governments, and markets interact. He always insisted, from 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments' onwards, that the 'invisible hand of the market' would regulate capitalist impulses and channel excessive behaviour into productive and beneficent projects. 'The Wealth of Nations' further addresses questions of sovereignty of colonies, the origins of coinage, and the concept of credit, all of which would have a profound influence on the germinating United States of America, which declared independence in July 1776, the same year that Smith's work was first published. 
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Price HK$ 20,000



 
Results 25 - 32 of 36 results