Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$1024.63 + shipping
Condition: Near Fine
Description: This is a green leather gift binding from the "RUGBY SCHOOL" with a bookplate attached to the inside of the front cover "SCHOLAE RUGBEIENSIS ALUMNO STUDIIS FELICITER COEPTIS MDCCCLXX" (1870) Goldstamped design and printing on cover and spine, 6 spine compartments/ 5 raised bands." Rugby School is a co-educational day and boarding school located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England. Rugby School is a registered charity and is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain having been founded in 1567". There is also an inscription inside "To Robert Wilce (or Wilee) with best congratulations from John L. Blum" I checked online and did find an author who wrote a book on flora "John L. Blum" Good posibility it is the same person since there is a common thread "FLORA". Verso of title page has a list of other books written by Darwin, Collation i-viii, 1-352 which includes the index. There are no ads in this volume.
Seller: Barry's Books, San Antonio, TX, U.S.A.
Price: US$1030.61 + shipping
Description: pp. viii, 352, 20 Catalogue [January 1877]. 15 text figures. Original green Murray cloth, a tiny spot of adherence on the front end-papers, small Bodleian Library duplicate stamp on the blank before the title, Radcliffe Library stamp on title and page 1, the tip of one leaf torn off not affecting text, despite which a pretty good copy. *FREEMAN #1277 -
Seller: Patrick Pollak Rare Books ABA ILAB, SOUTH BRENT, DEVON, United Kingdom
Price: US$1050.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: Size: 7 5/8" x 5 1/2". Text body is clean, and free from previous owner annotation, underlining and highlighting. G. [Gift binding] Full leather with gilt decoration along the edges of the boards and along the spine, five raised bands, a black leather and a red leather spine label, marbled end papers, gilt inner dentelles, 352 pages. Wear at corners and spine ends, boards have light scratches, previous owner's name label (Erastus Corning 2nd (1909-1983), Mayor of Albany, NY) on front paste down, several pages uncut. Quantity Available: 1. Shipped Weight: 2 lbs 11 oz. Category: Science & Technology; Pictures of this item not already displayed here available upon request. Inventory No: 015021.
Seller: Dennis Holzman Antiques, Cohoes, NY, U.S.A.
Price: US$1260.00 + shipping
Condition: Good
Description: Second edition, revised. London: John Murray, 1877. Octavo (7 3/8" x 5", 188mm x 128mm). [Full collation available.] With 38 woodcuts in-text. Bound in the publisher's green blocked cloth. Spine gilt. Brown-coated end-papers. Partly decased, with the rear hinge intact. Wear to the extremities. First free end-paper and initial binder's blank joined laid in. Lightening to the edges of the end-papers. Very scattered mild foxing. Ownership signature of George Basalla on the half-title-page. Typed letter signed from Myron F. Brightfield on University of California, Berkeley Department of English letterhead to Basalla laid in. After Darwin (1809-1882) published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he was particularly struck by criticism that his work lacked rigor -- that it was a book of broad strokes rather than the methodical work of a natural scientist. He had begun work on Orchids as early as 1838, but it was first published only in 1862, the first post-Origin monograph. Darwin wrote to his publisher John Murray: "I think this little volume will do good to the 'Origin', as it will show that I have worked hard at details" (24 September 1861). The particular details to which Darwin refers are the interactions ("crossing") of plants and animals as they develop and diverge and the role they played in the synergistic evolution of those species. Orchids presented themselves as a particularly good way of working out this synergy because their physiologies were so various and so particular. Darwin built on the work of C.K. Sprengel and others who had begun to investigate orchids' particular methods of fertilization, but in view of the Origin he was able to apply to the interactive evolutions with much greater effect. The second edition contains new material from an 1869 paper, and has a slightly different title. George Basalla is professor emeritus of the history of science at the University of Delaware. He has published widely on the subject, including a good deal of work on Darwin in particular. His 1989 Evolution of Technology (Cambridge UP) applies Darwinian theory to the technology era. The letter from Myron J. Brightfield (for many decades professor English at Berkeley) discusses orchids, presumably based on a request from Basalla for references to them in Victorian novels, on which Brightfield was an expert, eventually publishing (posthumously) the four-volume Victorian England in its novels. Freeman 801.
Seller: Arader Books, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Price: US$2000.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: Octavo (20 cm); viii, 352, 32 (ads) pages. Ads dated March 1877. Original green cloth, titled in gilt on spine. Foxing to endleaves and to fore edge, else clean and unblemished.
Seller: Rodger Friedman Rare Book Studio, ABAA, Tuxedo, NY, U.S.A.
Price: US$86957.75 + shipping
Description: First edition, presentation copy, inscribed on the title page, "With the compliments of the author". Most unusually for a Darwin presentation, the inscription is in Darwin's own hand rather than one of Murray's clerks. Different Forms of Flowers was published in a first edition of 1,250 copies on 9 July 1877. There was only a single issue, with the publisher's catalogue dated either January or March 1877, here the latter, without priority. Darwin explained in his autobiography that "this book consists chiefly of the several papers on heterostyled flowers originally published by the Linnean Society, corrected, with much new matter added, together with observations on some other cases in which the same plant bears two kinds of flowers. As before remarked, no little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as the making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers" (Life and Letters I, p. 78). Freeman remarks that, "had Darwin not chosen such genetically complex examples, he might have approached more nearly to an understanding of the laws of particulate inheritance". Regardless, it remains a seminal text on plant reproduction, adaptation, and evolution. It was translated into French and German during Darwin's lifetime, followed by four further languages after his death. Presentation copies of any of Darwin's books with the inscription written in the author's hand are notably uncommon: the usual procedure was for such inscriptions to be written by one of Murray's clerks on Darwin's behalf. We have handled just two other first editions of Different Forms of Flowers inscribed by the author, both of which had the March publisher's catalogue, as here. At auction, we count between two and four further authorial presentation copies, the range due to the inexact nature of some of the early 20th-century descriptions. Freeman 1277; Norman 602. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 1887. Octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, decorative bands at ends in gilt, covers blocked in blind, dark brown coated endpapers, Simpson & Renshaw binder's ticket on rear pastedown. Housed in a dark green quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery. 15 woodcut illustrations and 38 tables within text. Publisher's 32-page catalogue dated March 1877 at rear. Spine ends gently bumped, cloth bright, binding very discreetly restored and recoloured, endpapers slightly faded, previous ownership signature on dedication page subsequently erased, a handful of neat pencil marks (annotation to p. 1 translating the title into French, marginal crosses and lines to a few other pp.), faint semicircular damp mark running through upper margins of first c.140 pages, else the contents notably clean, publisher's catalogue lightly foxed towards end: a near-fine copy.
Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom