General Chemistry (Preliminary Edition)
Pasadena: Lithographed by Edwards Bros. (Privately printed), 1944. 1st Edition. Hardcover. A RARE PRELIMINARY EDITION OF PAULING'S MAGNUM OPUS TEXTBOOK: GENERAL CHEMISTRY. Issued before the "official" 1947 first edition. BOOK DETAILS AND CONDITION: 8vo, softcover, some stains on original wrappers, internally VG xi+239pp+1 blank, preliminary edition of Pauling's 1947 text RARITY: Correspondence 12/10/08 from Clifford S. Mead, Head of Special Collections, including Linus Pauling archive, at Oregon State University, indicates that the first version was printed in two thin volumes locally in 1941 with a later local printing in one softcover volume in 1941; the present 1944 edition was the next and final edition and was printed and bound out of state). According to Greg Girolami and Vera Mainz, WorldCat lists six copies of the 1941 edition (only one of the 2-volume first issue). We find eleven copies of the 1944 second preliminary edition listed in Worldcat. PROVENANCE: Prior property of Arthur C. Greenberg. Signature and address in Pasadena in book from Ralph Lutwack. Lutwack was an electrical engineer at Caltech and Ph.D. student of Pauling (degree in 1954). He did his undergrad work at Caltech and would likely have picked up this copy of Pauling's private text in a chemistry course at that time. REFERENCES: See A. Greenberg, From Alchemy to Chemistry in Picture and Story, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2007, p. 563. Greenberg writes "In a 1944 draft of his future text we see two rather basic, if pedestrian, schematric diagrams likely drafted by the author - one illustrating Avogadro's law of combining volumes of gases and the other, an electrochemical cell. And here we might try to imagine Pauling, as always, impatiently reaching beyond the possible." Very Good / No Jacket. Item #EBS100481
Price: $1,800.00