Lot 124
Hobbes, Thomas
Tracts
The Library of James Stirling, Mathematician
Auction: 23 October 2025 from 13:00 GMT
Description
Containing I. Behemoth, the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England … Never printed (but with a Thousand Faults) before. II. An Answer to Arch-Bishop Bramhall's Book, called the Catching of the Leviathan, never printed before. III. An Historical Narration of Heresie … IV. Philosophical Problems dictated to the King in 1662 but never printed before. London: for W. Crooke, 1682. First edition, 8vo (18 x 10.5cm), contemporary calf, red morocco label, blind tooling to covers, vi 339 [5], [4] 160, [8] 84 [2] pp., engraved portrait frontispiece, engraved folding plate, advertisement leaf to rear (=G3), apparently retaining the initial and final blanks (A1 and G4 according to ESTC, though M & H have the frontispiece as A1), binding rubbed, pencilled mathematical notation to front free endpaper and initial blank (part of endpaper torn away), contemporary inked annotation (possibly a price) to head of front free endpaper [ESTC R19913; Macdonald & Hargreaves 100]
Footnote
First edition, with James Stirling's ownership inscription ('Ja: Stirling') to the recto of the frontispiece. Stirling's interest in the work was perhaps due mainly to the fourth part, ‘Philosophical Problems’, of which the first chapter is titled ‘Problems of Gravity’ and the seventh ‘Problems of Motion Perpendicular, Oblique; of Pression and Percussion; Reflection and Refraction; Attraction and Repulsion’.