Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (in 3 vols.)

London: Richard Bentley, 1841. First edition. Near Fine. Three volumes, octavo (leaves 221 x 138mm), collating: [6], 400; [6], 406; [6], 404 pp. Bound without publisher's advertisements, as often, and without half-title in volume one. Otherwise complete with the half-titles in volumes two and three, and with five engraved portraits: a frontispiece in each volume and two additional portraits in volume three. Nineteenth-century half polished red calf over marbled boards. Gilt spine in six compartments with raised bands. Expert leather repair to joints and edges. Top edges gilt. Marbled endpapers with early twentieth-century bookplates (George F. Steele) to upper pastedowns. Very clean and fresh throughout. An excellent, Near Fine set.

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

Scottish journalist Charles Mackay's early study in crowd psychology, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions sets out to debunk sensational issues ranging from alchemy, fortune-telling and haunted houses to large-scale and serious political issues such as crusades and economic bubbles. Across the three volumes, Mackay explores three different categories of "Delusions" and "Follies": Economic Delusions in volume one, Peculiar Follies in volume two, and Philosophical Delusions in volume three.

The impact of Mackay's work has been remarkably far-reaching, influencing such diverse fields as popular psychology and the charting of the stock market - as noted by The New York Times, which urged: "Any investor who has not read Charles Mackay's 'Tulipomania,' from his classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions, first published in 1841, should grab this book for that exercise alone."

Norman 1406. Kress C.5560. Near Fine.