Philadelphia: Printed for M. Carey & Sons, ... 1821.
Price: $1,200.00
Hardcover. Second American edition, revised, corrected and improved. Octavo. 408pp. Rebound in modern quarter brown morocco and cloth boards, with morocco label gilt. Binding has light wear, and a slight crease to one corner, and is near fine; there is foxing and edgewear in the text, overall very good. Joseph Ray's copy with his ownership signature and the price he paid for the book on the first blank: "Joseph Ray, Cincinnati, Ohio. $1.50." Also laid in between page 280 and 281 is a small slip of paper (approximately 4" x 5") signed "Ray" and with complex equations on each side. Ray was a professor of mathematics and wrote several books on the subject, beginning in 1834 with *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 Nineteenth Century. They also formed the basis for *Ray's Mathematical Series* of textbooks. 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 set of readers. They chose William Holmes McGuffey, who joined Ray on the faculty of Woodward College, and where he wrote the *McGuffey Readers* which surpassed even Ray's *Arithmetics* to become the most popular textbooks ever written.
Item #293105
