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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$ 5,000



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



The Stones of Venice - The Foundations, The Sea-Stories; The Fall. With Illustrations drawn by the Author - John Ruskin

1873-1874 - Smith, London - Signed Limited Edition
Elegantly bound set of Ruskin’s classic and influential treatise on Venetian art and architecture, limited to 1,500 copies signed by Ruskin.

Illustrated with 53 mixed technique plates (including lithograph, mezzotint, aquatint and engraved, some tinted or hand-coloured), together with wood engraved illustrations and diagrams throughout the text.

‘Among the many strange things that have befallen Venice, she had the good fortune to become the object of passion to a man of splendid genius’ -
Henry James on John Ruskin.

The book aroused considerable interest in Victorian Britain and beyond. The chapter "The Nature of Gothic" (from volume 2) was admired by William Morris, who published it separately in an edition which is in itself an example of Gothic revival. It inspired Marcel Proust; the narrator of the Recherche visits Venice with his mother in a state of enthusiasm for Ruskin.
 
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Price HK$ 30,000



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$ 10,000



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



An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. With A Life of the Author, an Introductory Discourse, Notes, and Supplemental Dissertations by J. R. M Culloch, Esq. - Adam Smith, J. R. McCulloch

1828 - Printed for Adam Black, Edinburgh - First McCulloch Edition
Four volumes in contemporary bindings, with a portrait frontispiece of Smith in Volume 1 after the Tassie bust. ‘Of real importance is [this] edition by John Ramsay McCulloch (1828) which contains a life of Smith and numerous notes, first published in four volumes and later in single-volume editions which for some three decades were used by students almost to the exclusion of others’. [Bullock]

First published in 1776, ‘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$ 25,000



 
Results 25 - 32 of 37 results