New York: D. Appleton and Company; McClure, Phillips & Company; The Science Press; Modern Publishing Company, 1872-1976.
Price: $12,000.00
Hardcover. A near-complete set of 205 bound volumes of monthly issues published between May 1872 to December 1976 (vols. 1-209), lacking only five volumes, and with all monthly issues dating after November 1900 with their printed wrappers bound in. All are bound in cloth or cloth over boards. Illustrated with engraved frontispiece plates; plates and maps (some folded); and in-text wood-engravings, gravure and halftone photographs, diagrams, tables, etc.
Founded in 1872 by the chemist and polymath Edward L. Youmans, *The Popular Science Monthly* was the leading American journal established to disseminate scientific knowledge to the educated layman. Youmans was associated with many of the world’s leading liberal and progressive thinkers, ranging from Walt Whitman to Herbert Spencer, and his journal became an outlet for the writings and ideas of Spencer and other Continental scientists like Thomas Henry Huxley and Louis Pasteur, and for the rising generation of American philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and William James, and psychologist James McKeen Cattell, who took over as editor in 1900. Among the many important first appearances are Peirce’s series of eight papers published in 1877-78 under the series title: *Illustrations of the Logic of Science*; a series of two lectures by William James: *A Defense of Pragmatism* (published in March and April, 1907); and three papers by John Dewey: “Health and Sex in Higher Education” (March 1886), “The Chaos in Moral Training” (August 1894), and “Darwin’s Influence upon Philosophy” (July 1909).
Also notable are several articles on women’s issues, of which we cite but three browsed at random: “Woman and Political Power” by Luke Owen Pike (May 1872), Grant Allen’s “Plain Words on the Woman Question” (December 1889); and “Woman’s Struggle for Liberty in Germany” by Mary Mills Patrick (January 1900). Among the many articles published after the magazine changed its format in 1915, we cite Hugh Fullerton’s “Why Babe Ruth is the Greatest Home Run Hitter” (October 1921) as the best representative example of the type of article this award-winning magazine has published throughout the 20th Century and up through the present day.
An ex-library set with intermittent markings that varied over time, including: ownership stamps (small ink and/or embossed stamps in the early volumes, some perforated stamps in the middle volumes, and ink stamps in the later volumes), and bookplates. Modest overall soiling to the cloth bindings, some of the early printed wraps are toned and/or detached (still present), a few volumes with small repairs to the endpapers, most volumes are very good or better. A very scarce near-complete set.
Item #409666
