The Cathedrals and Conventual Churches of England and Wales Orthographically Delineated - Rare Book Insider
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The Cathedrals and Conventual Churches of England and Wales Orthographically Delineated

Scarce if incomplete example of King's Commonwealth era collection of views of churches and cathedrals with extensive provenance recorded on the book. PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION:Small folio-size bound in late 17th century panelled calf, rebacked, probably in the 19th century with a gilt heraldic device to the spine. Front pastedown has a c1800 manuscript list of plates in the related volume, also illustrated by King, Monasticon Anglicarum; the second flyleaf attempts a manuscript list of the plates present in this volume with two ownership inscriptions at the head of the page. The earliest is: 'Lib P Forester C.C.C.' apparently 'Donum W Bouchery' - probably the Latinist poet, Weyman Bouchery. Two leaves later a subsequent gift is recorded to the antiquary and topographer James Dallaway: 'Jac. Dallaway M.B. a secretis Ex Dono Ricardi Neave. 1800'. On the same page appears the stamp of 'W Appleton Jr Boston' and also the Fox Pointe bookplate. 56 engravings are present, mounted on stubs as well as additional stubs remaining where engravings have been removed. The engraved title page has been trimmed and mounted; Hollar's fine Canterbury image is present as well as images of Westminster Abbey, Durham Cathedral, Glastonbury, St Albans, Bangor, Ely, Selby and old St Paul's Cathedral which only survived a few years after this volume was published. A couple of closed tears to the engravings, and occasional old paper repairs; one engraving detached. A very pleasing collection. Please contact Christian White Rare Books Ltd for more information or images of this item
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MANUSCRIPT TRAVEL JOURNAL TO CHINA DURING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION by a Jewish Refugee from 1930s Austria

A minutely observed manuscript travel diary of a research-cum-sightseeing trip to China and the USSR, ending with a nostalgic visit to Vienna, that offers glimpses of a personal history shaped by the Holocaust. Austrian-Jewish by background the electrical engineer Ernst Billig (1904-1970)was born in Vienna, emigrated to England where he became Head of Solid State Physics at the British holding company, Associated Electrical Industries, (AEI) where his extensively-published research focused on semiconductors, crystal growth, and power transformers. PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Compact octavo format (13.1 x 9.1cm). Red flexible and textured plastic detachable covers over stiff white card boards, rounded corners, blind-ruled, blind-stamped circular motif of front-facing trolleybus to front cover with Chinese characters beneath. Red plastic a touch grubby, mark to rear cover, text block fully separated, but tight in itself. First and final pages pink, oval vignette of trolleybus to first page, numbered in blue biro: "#306" and below: "E Billig/ China, 1965". 19 pages of printed Chinese text, 2 fold-out (trolleybus?) maps printed in red, blue, green and black, the first double-sided; 80 leaves - 160 pages - ruled; 4 leaves - 8 pages - tables to rear. No pagination to manuscript sections, daily entries in ruled section dated (14.08.1965 through 02.10.1965): 2 blank pages to front, 3 in between entries, and 30 blank pages to rear, plus 6 blank pages in table section; making 125 pages of ruled text (of 160) and 2 pages of notes to tables (of 8). Script, in blue biro and ink, occasionally pencil, in a small, tight and often difficult hand, interspersed with rough, intriguing sketches; some names in Cyrillic. Numerous pieces of ephemera laid in, incl. tickets and notes. Clean and bright. The journal begins in 'Peking', followed by visits to 'Nanking', Shanghai and 'Hanchou,' returning to the capital, from where, on 01.09.1965, the author travels by train over 7 days to Moscow. After a two week stay, he returns home via Poland, East and West Germany, the Hook of Holland (15.09.1965) to Harwich (19.09.1965) and, finally, Liverpool Street. Later in September, he travels to Vienna, for a conference and to revisit his childhood neighbourhood. NARRATIVE: The author succinctly, but with close detail, documents cultural, industry-focused and academic visits to cities and provinces, including dignitaries met and receptions attended. In China, he notes, for example: - the People's Red Star Commune, 40km south of Peking, with an overview of production and life, rich with facts and figures - its size, population & husbandry etc; - in Nanking he meets Prof. Wang (University Nanking, Physics department), and observes: "All industry here mainly chemical, nothing electrical". At a reception he receives a "toast of welcome," hosted by Dr Wang, President of the Division of Science & Technology of Jiangsu province and observes that discussion focuses on the main concern in the province, agriculture. - in Shanghai the author visits a chemical factory and in Hanchou a sanatorium. - the diary is textured with everyday observations: "All shops open in China on Sundays, even evenings (service to people comes first)"; children sing, "welcome foreign uncle"; at the Chinese frontier (03.09.1965) a polite doctor, asks: "do you feel well?" while the author notes the "v. close inspection, esp. my notes and papers" and decries the "stodgy" food in the restaurant car. During the long train journey, stations and distances are noted, the food at stations, and conversations with new Russian friends, who tell him: "The Chinese want war, we don't; had enough" and "think that Chin. 'cult' (Mao) is all wrong." The author arrives in Moscow 07.09.1965 and again documents his sightseeing, industry-related and academic events, plus everyday observations. For example, - Dr Fulaer? picks him up in his "old own car" and takes him to an Institute at Marx Prospect; he also visits the Lebedev Physical Institute and the Inst. of Neurosurgery, "Dir. of Inst. Prof. Frank", including brief notes on people and work. - he notes the 3km queue to see Lenin: "Policeman waved me to head of queue; hushed silence, white luminous face & hands"; he finds "stores well stocked" but "always crowds" and queuing, "(queue 2 or 3x)". En route home (departing 13.09.1965), in Warsaw, he visit the old market and ghetto, noting the "monument in black marble to 600, 000 Jews". The journal's final entries cover a nostalgic visit to Vienna, where the author attends a conference (21.09.1965, the start of the "European Symposium on Magnetism"), and visits his old neighbourhood, including the family shop (now a sweet shop) and "Walk[s] in to daddy's grave, all grown over, clean up (gardener lends me tools)". He meets old acquaintances: "after 40 years! is 78 but his face & eyes not changed [.] only hair is grey. Tells about past life under Nazis (how to keep ? together in spite of Goebbels" and, another friend: "Tells us about Frans ? (arrested 1938 in Moscow, never heard since, left with 4 yr old son, Georg, also Clara & Diedrich (NKVD & Auschwitz)"; the Holocaust hangs over the visit. The Conference the author mentions in his Vienna section is the First European Conference on Hard Magnetic Materials (September 1965). Please contact Christian White Rare Books Ltd for more information or images of this item
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GENEVA BIBLE The Bible. Translated According to the Ebrew and Greeke, and Conferred with the Best Translations in Divers Languages [and] Two Right Profitable and Fruitfull Concordances

Textually complete 1584 Geneva Bible in an attractive binding which begins with Genesis, continuing through the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, followed by the New Testament and Two Concordances but lacking the general title and preliminaries. 1580s Geneva Bibles are increasingly scarce and this example has been owned by the same Manchester family for 150 years PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Attractively bound quarto (21x16cm) with an early 17th century upper board, a later 17th century panelled calf lower board and the spine sympathetically rebacked around 1900. New front flyleaf and pastedown inserted during this last restoration; first flyleaf with 19th century ownership inscription of 'D L Ginger' and below a gift inscription to a 'Dr Barker'; second flyleaf torn. First three leaves of Genesis with paper repairs to gutter but the book collates complete: ff554 - 1108 pages followed by A-M4 Two Concordances. Browning throughout; margins close cropped; very little annotation apart from an italic hand written c1600 on the verso of the New Testament title page, 'Purifie our harts we bessech the most gratious god.'. TEXT begins with Genesis, Chapter I, Verse I, therefore lacking the general title and preliminary pages. The Old Testament has been collated and is complete through to leaf number 444, followed by a complete New Testament with its own dated title page set inside a woodcut border. The Two Right Profitable and Fruitfull Concordances have the preface by Robert F Herrey, dated 1578 and this imprint dates from the early 1580s. The Bible is printed in black letter type in two columns with frequent notes and marginal commentary. Noted during collation: f204, closed tear at head of page; ff316-7, semicircular loss at head of page, 7cm wide, touching first 5 lines of text; f341, narrow semicircular loss, 2cm wide, 5 cm deep, head of page; f440, old paper repair to foreedge, touching Barker's 'Tigre Reo' device printed below the Questions on Predestination; f466, outer top corner, just touching marginal note; f520, lower third of leaf diagonally missing; f526, lower sixth of leaf missing; f533 lower outer corner of leaf missing 5x4cm; Concordances, M1, upper, outer corner, 3x3cm. This collation doesn't seem to match any known example of a Barker Bible but is closely related to Darlow and Moule 165, a Geneva Bible of 1580 with the same collation and Barker's device after Malachi, on the title page of the Concordances and above the colophon on the last page. A small cut of the royal arms is also found at the end of Revelation. PROVENANCE Mr Alfred Richardson, Manchester Church Warden and by descent for three generations, shown at a Manchester Bible Exhibition which was advertised as an attempt to locate the oldest Bible still in private hands within the city. HISTORY The Geneva Bible was first issued in England in 1575 and it would become the Bible of Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan, as well as the Pilgrim Fathers. In the words of Cleland Boyd McAfee, its forceful and vigorous readings "drove the Great Bible off the field by sheer power of excellence". The key advantage of this Bible was its size. As a quarto it could easily be held and read, making it the first domestic Elizabethan Bible. The care and maintenance given this volume means that it is in a suitable condition to be read and actively enjoyed. Please contact Christian White Rare Books Ltd for more information or images of this item
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HISTORY OF AI: AN ARCHIVE OF EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 1936-1969

A substantial collection of published and privately circulated documents relating to early experiments in AI, including largely unknown research papers dating from around the time the name 'Artificial Intelligence' was coined (c.1956). The collection forms a unique record of the creation of Artificial Intelligence during the early years of computing in the form of 60 typescripts, offprints, photographs, ephemera and association copies. It shows the making of a Silicon Valley revolution as well as revealing many unknown aspects of this so-far little-known story with its surprisingly deep history, dating from the 1930s to the 1960s. Just as ChatGPT has pushed AI from a hot topic in the tech industry to a global news phenomenon, so AI has become the defining technology of our age. In this collection we can see how the invention of digital computing itself in the 1950s led to 'logic machines' which promised to imitate intelligence. Here we discover an entire program of 'Digitalized Logic', many unrecorded or otherwise unobtainable items including the program codes for a 'list processing' language developed at Cambridge in the 1960s called 'WISP'. Another highlight is an extraordinarily rich letter on the 'Turing Test' by perhaps the most profound philosopher of the postwar era, David Lewis. Pioneers like Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch and Maurice Wilkes are well represented. So too are women like Thyllis Williams and Joyce Friedman, who worked at the cutting edge of this field in its early years. Even as the first 'golden age' of AI ended this collection shows how many of the central ideas in Deep Learning had already been developed - the statistical analysis of 'neural nets'; language models that could draw on vast bodies of literature to make predictions; probabilistic computing; the idea of a machine that could pass for a person. Only now are we living with the consequences of these ideas. In brief the collection comprises 60 items: 22 technical reports; 29 offprints/preprints; 2 association/proof copies; 7 pieces of ephemera over the period 1936–1969 with a linear measurement of 41cm. Please request a full and detailed listing of the collection's contents which we will be happy to provide. Please contact Christian White Rare Books Ltd for more information or images of this item
THE VELASQUEZ ARE QUITE MARVELLOUS' Year Abroad Diary of the Future Establishment 'Portraitist Par Excellence'

THE VELASQUEZ ARE QUITE MARVELLOUS’ Year Abroad Diary of the Future Establishment ‘Portraitist Par Excellence’

Oswald Birley Oswald Birley's painting-saturated diary written in the winter months of his year abroad in the Mediterranean which records his obsession with Velasquez who would go on to inspire the artist's enormously successful practice, as well as offering an eye witness account of the Friday ceremonial of the penultimate Ottoman Sultan. PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Small quarto manuscript book bound in half roan over marbled boards - rubbed but sound. All edges marbled; marbled endpapers. At one end of the MS is written 'Diary 1905 Jan 10-' followed by 19 pages of diary entries, January 10th-Jan 25th. At the other end is written 'Oswald Birley 1905' on the second flyleaf and as-if inadvertently Birley picks up in media res on January 26th - at least one page stub precedes this section. Birley continues the narrative over 38 pages, ending with increasingly sketchy entries up to February 28th when he had succumbed to his Velasquez obsession in Madrid - and lost interest in his diary. We can find no record of any institutional holdings of Birley's diaries. A small collection of archival material is held at the Frick Museum. NARRATIVE: Birley's journey began in London, travelling on board the Princess Alice to Genoa, arriving Jan 18th, 1905, after being held at sea overnight during a storm, waking to find 'the Italian Riviera all covered with white'. Birley toured Genoa's palazzi but 'the best pictures are in the Palazzo Pallavicini: the best represented Van Dyk, Rubens, and Andrea del Sarto: there is also a very fine Paul Veronese in the Andrea Doria Palazzo', continuing via Naples and Pompei, thence to Rome by train, visiting the Villa Borghese where 'the great thing of course being Titian's Sacred and Profane Love' and called on 'Sir E[dwin] Egerton our Ambassador'. In Rome Birley made a special visit 'to see the Velasquez portrait of Pope Innocent X in the Palazzo Doria - it's in a room by itself and is a marvellous arrangement of colour in different tones of red in the background, cap, chair and clothes with only his grey collar a warm white skirt to set if off & the head is beautifully modelled' (Jan 24). On the way to Greece Birley visited the Empress of Austria's villa on Corfu and in Athens 'the Acropolis. so wonderful: everything of Pentelion marble but which has become almost golden with age, colour must be far finer now than it was when it was quite white'. Birley returned to the Acropolis two days later 'and sketched another bas-relief', making one more visit to photograph the scene. Continuing to Istanbul (staying at the Pera Palace hotel) Birley found himself slightly overwhelmed by a performance of the 'howling dervishes' but having gained permission from the British envoy was fascinated by viewing 'the Sultan's procession which he makes every Friday to his mosque there. There is a sort of terrace reserved for foreigners and one has an excellent view of everything. all the generals, dignitaries in their war paint on the road. Everything very well stage managed. The Sultan appeared about 12.30 and went down to the mosque. He looks more than 62 - and has a most evil looking face - pale unhealthy face - a long beaky nose and he has dyed his beard a reddish colour.' Birley's European apotheosis came when he arrived in Madrid (Feb 23, 1905) instantly visiting the Prado where 'the Velasquez are quite marvellous: much finer than anything I had ever imagined. There are about 35 collected in one large Room with the Surrender of Breda at the end and by itself. In a small room leading out of it Las Meninas which is simply marvellous. Absolutely alive. Had no difficulty in getting permission to copy and settled on one of the dwarfs', an experience Birley repeats until the diary ends: 'Working all day in the Prado'. Spent all day drawing in the Velasquez Copy. Working all day in the Prado. El Prado with the Henrys' - Birley had arrived where he needed to be and here the diary ends. Born in 1880 and educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, this diary dates from the year after he had begun studying at the Academie Julian in Paris and St John's Wood School of Art. His career-defining debut solo exhibition in London had to wait until 1919 and his reputation made he would go on to paint Mahatma Gandhi, Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill in an oeuvre that combines 'aesthetic and psychological realism' (Philip Mould). Birley kept the copies of Velasquez that he made while in Madrid and they can be seen in photographs from the 1920s of his studio in St John's Wood. Thanks to Philip Mould's Power & Beauty: the Art of Oswald Birley, Please contact Christian White Rare Books Ltd for more information or images of this item
  • $1,968
  • $1,968
VOLTAIRE'S CRITIQUE OF CLERICAL TAXATION & THE PAMPHLET WAR IT INSPIRED: La Voix du Sage du Peuple [with] Lettre de Turc a Son Correspondant a Constantinople [with] La Voix du Pretre [with] La Voix du Poete et Celle du Levite [with] La Voix du Fou et des Femmes etc

VOLTAIRE’S CRITIQUE OF CLERICAL TAXATION & THE PAMPHLET WAR IT INSPIRED: La Voix du Sage du Peuple [with] Lettre de Turc a Son Correspondant a Constantinople [with] La Voix du Pretre [with] La Voix du Poete et Celle du Levite [with] La Voix du Fou et des Femmes etc

M de Voltaire Voltaire's 'short explosive' critique of clerical taxation with 7 further pamphlets which it inspired, most with false imprints in 'Londres' and 'Utrech'. Duodecimo volume bound in contemporary polished calf, 'Les Voix' to the spine label. Marbled endpapers; an early owner has written 'Recueil de Petites Pieces faites a L'occasion des affaires du clerge En 1750 Au Novembre du 10.' Several of the pamphlets have the remnants of an owner's name at the head of the title page but this was trimmed during binding. The pamplets are in very good condition. Old casemark on final flyleaf. The imprints appear as following: 1 [Jean de Dieu d'Olivier] Lettre de Turc a Son Correspondant a Constantinople, 1750, Londres - probably Amsterdam, pp22, name of early owner above the title but shaved during binding. 2 [Voltaire] La Voix du Sage du Peuple, 1750, Amsterdam(?), Chez le Sincere, pp16 3 [Joseph Constantin] La Voix du Pretre, 1750, A Utrech, Paris(?) Chex Chrisos-tome Mis-an-Mitre, a la verite [2] pp94 4 La Voix du Poete et Celle du Levite, 1750, Genimanie en Parisis Chez Philosolphes, a l'Enseigne de la Verite, pp22 - a reponse to Voltaire and Constantin 5 [Jean de Dieu d'Olivier] La Voix du Fou et des Femmes, 1750, a Londres [Paris], pp12 6 Memoires pour Servir a L'Histoire des Immunites de L'Eglise ou Les Conferences Ecclesiastiques de Madame de. La Voix de La Femme, 1750 [Paris], pp12 7 [caption title] La Voix du Riche [1750] [Paris] pp24 8 [De la Barre] Les Voix Intervenantes La Voix du Pauvre, 1751, La Haye, pp34 Voltaire's La Voix du Sage du Peuple was the first of the philosopher's works to be put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. An uncommon work, it is often found bound up with one or more of these related imprints that it sparked into existence. In 1750 Voltaire wrote La Voix du sage et du peuple, arguing that the Church should contribute its share to the expenses of the nation to exemplify its teachings. He complained that the monasteries were wasting the seeds of men and the resources of the land. The Catholic Church put it on the Index, and on May 21, 1751 the French government itself condemned the pamphlet. Please contact Christian White Rare Books Ltd for more information or images of this item
  • $1,246
  • $1,246