New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1838.
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Hardcover. Second edition, revised and corrected. Original publisher's figured brown cloth titled in gilt. 308pp., 14 folding plates. Contemporary owner's name ("Joseph Ray, Cincinnati"), some modest edgewear to the corners and spine ends, a near very good copy. A book of practical engineering and mathematics. Ray was a professor of mathematics and wrote several books on the subject, beginning in 1834: *An Introduction to Ray’s Eclectic Arithmetic*, the first of a series of six textbooks which became the most popular and widely used American mathematics textbooks of the 19th Century. They also formed the basis for *Ray’s Mathematical Series* series of textbooks, of which as late as 1913, annual sales exceeded a quarter of a million copies a year, and total sales of the arithmetic books alone are estimated at 120 million copies. The success of Ray’s *Arithmetic* series prompted his publisher to seek an author for a corresponding set of readers. They chose William Holmes McGuffey, who joined Ray on the faculty of Woodward College, where he wrote the *McGuffey Readers*, which surpassed even Ray’s *Arithmetics* to become the most popular textbooks ever written.
Item #291278
