Titles starting with V from B & L Rootenberg Rare Books & Manuscripts

Stapled into original wrappers, tattered and detached; some light soiling. Contemporary underlining to text. Embossed stamp of Aurora College, Illinois to title. First edition of this pamphlet, written to discuss the question of the repeal of certain embargo laws.... more information

Disbound. Later edition of this poem, which was reprinted from the March and April, 1882 issues of College and Clinical Records of Jefferson. Meigs (1829-79), a graduate of Jefferson Medical College, and later there Professor of the Institutes of Medicine and Medical Jurisprudence, specialized in craniography, writing several works on the subject. ... more information

Large woodcut portrait of the author on the title page and full-page woodcut coat of arms of Pope Paul II, the dedicatee, on the verso of the second leaf. Contemporary vellum, title in ink on spine; minor staining, small stamp on title. First edition, extremely rare, of this collection of medical and astrological aphorisms. Like many other physicians of the time, Forti used astrology as a method of diagnosing illness. Sound medical practice was to review a patient’s astrological chart to determine whi... more information

Title in red and black. Original red publisher’s cloth, in original grey and red dust-jacket, lightly soiled; a fine uncut copy. Inscribed by Moore on front fly-leaf to Jim and Anna [Roosevelt] Halstead, as well as five lines of verse in Moore’s hand about them. First edition. Includes the poems An oddly assorted couple that got on well; Their patterns of sleeping differed violently; and What women are and why they are the way they are. Anna Halstead (1906-75) was the eldest child and only daughte... more information

Engraved frontispiece in vos. I & II, frontispiece portraits of Harvey and Hoffman in vos. IV & V. Uniformly bound in contemporary quarter-calf over marbled boards, gilt-decorated spines. Second edition, revised, of this esteemed history of medicine by Sprengel (1766-1833), professor of medicine and botany at the University of Halle and nephew of the eminent botanist Christian Konrad Sprengel. The work includes chapters on the history of surgical operations, construction of an artificial nose and am... more information

Half-cloth over boards; a fine, uncut copy. First edition, which is still considered his masterpiece, and according to Freud, his culminating work. "Ferenczi made use of his background in neurological and embryological research, for here he attempted to correlate biological and psychological phenomens - - to establish, as it were, a unified theory."... more information

With 26 figures on 8 folding engraved plates, woodcut decorations, vignettes and initial letters. Contemporary pasteboards with the owner's monogram in a baroque gilt decoration on front cover, edges sprinkled red; a fine copy. First editions of these very rare treatises on animals. The first two works are more practical in nature. Along with a natural history of house flies, maggots, and fleas, the author deals with bee and wasp stings, bookworms, snails, rats, mice, ants, etc., and provides household ... more information

With colour frontispiece and 60 plates (12 colour). Half-morocco and cloth; a lovely untrimmed copy. First edition containing the illustrations of Edmund J. Sullivan. A limited printing, this copy is number 53 of 500 signed by the illustrator.... more information

Frontispiece and 7 colour plates. Original red cloth in dust-jacket. This edition includes a short biography of the author and plates by the illustrator John Austen (1886-1948). Austen’s earlier work was heavily influenced by the great illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, and he eventually fine tuned and simplified his style until it became what we find in the present volume. He was the illustrator for numerous books put out by the Heritage Press and the Illustrated Editions Club, including Vanity Fair, Pick... more information

Blue cloth with blind stamped boards, lightly rubbed and soiled; lacks free endpapers, pages toned. First edition. In addition to the poetry, it includes notes on Seward's visit to Port-au Prince, Haiti, in 1866. Monaghan 844. ... more information

Woodcuts by Hans Weiditz depict a charming stockyard scene on the title page, and a trio of men with a horse on the first leaf (two of the three men have their eyes gouged out, presumably by a previous owner), plus 16 additional smaller text woodcuts of animals. Later vellum; interior lightly browned, faint water stain on first and last leaves, unobtrusive repair on the title page, otherwise an excellent copy. This rare treatise on veterinary medicine is distinguished for being the first illustrated edition... more information

Original rust-coloured publisher’s cloth with brown end-papers; a fine copy. First edition of Clarke’s (1820-77) final work, a study of hallucinations and visions, and their causes. It contains an interesting study of the effects of drugs such as quinine, digitalis, opium, Indian Hemp (hashish), ether and alcohol on vision, as well as the influence of disease and volition. Clarke details a case communicated to him by the neurologist and novelist S. Weir Mitchell, one of the most prominent physicia... more information

With 8 folding tables. Contemporary half-calf over boards. FIRST EDITION of Werner's first published work, in which he classified the outward characteristics of minerals, and, according to Sparrow, "introduced entirely new methods in the description of minerals." In describing this treatise, Geikie suspects that to their delight, lovers of mineralogy found in it "an admirably ordered method and a clear marshalling and co-ordination of facts, such as had never before been seen in mineralog... more information

Original publisher's cloth, covers stained. An excellent uncut copy from the library of Dutch astronomer Adriaan van Maanen with his signature dated 14 April 1906 on the fly-leaf and his presentation bookplate to the Mount Wilson Observatory on the paste-down. Second and best edition of Planck's famous treatise, a presentation of the entire subject from a uniform point of view. It describes the developments of thermodynamics and its applications to physical and chemical problems.Max Planck... more information

With 39 text diagrams. Original printed wrappers. First edition of a series of lectures in two parts, comprising 20 essays in all. The first part gives the background to the theory of relativity and leads on to Einstein, Maxwell, Lorentz and Minkowski. The second part is a more detailed discussion of the specific problems in the theory and concludes with a postscript on Weyl's theory. ... more information

French and English text on facing pages. Contemporary calf, somewhat worn; offsetting and browning throughout and a few marginal tears, not affecting text. Contemporary ownership signatures of A. Watkins and William Wayland, with a manuscript correction of French and other pencilled annotations. First American edition, which, according to the author's preface, is only a part of a more extensive work entitled Arcadia. The author states that his traveller arrives in Arcadia from Egypt after visiting Gaul,... more information