My copy of Molinari’s 1859 De l’enseignement obligatoire (co-authored with the first libertarian Nobel laureate) arrived today from a bookseller in Geneva – and unexpectedly turns out to carry an autograph from Molinari himself!
à mon ami Henry [?] Logh,
G. de Molinari
It joins the happy company of my autographed copy of Paterson’s Singing Season (though that one I knew about when I ordered it).
That must be a g-r-r-eat feeling!
I was perusing Black Oak Books in Berkeley the other day and found an autographed copy of Defending the Undefendable by Block. They’ve got some great stuff in there, but a bit overpriced on rare yet terribly dilapidated books. Found The Beauracratization of the World by Bruno Rizzi, written in the 20s and foreshadowing Djilas’s The New Class and Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution.
Anyway, just felt like geekin’ out for a moment…
Another happy find, in a Harvard Square bookstore some years back, was a book on logic, not written by Quine but formerly owned by him, that had inside not only his signature but a fancy cloth bookmark monogrammed WVQ.
I also have an autographed copy of Rothbard’s Power and Market; IHS had a stack of autographed copies and was giving them away to students who attended their seminars back in the 80s.
“and unexpectedly turns out to carry an autograph from Molinari himself!”
Mahzel tov! I once ordered vol. 3 of Horace Traubel’s “With Walk Whitman in Camden,” to find that it was autographed by Anne Montgomery, Traubel’s fiance and a member of the Whitman circle (which of course included a number of fin de siecle anarchists and socialists). “Traubel,” obviously added later, appears after her name.
The kicker is, when I looked at it just now, I realized to my stunned amazement, that it is also autographed by Traubel himself. It’s in a semi-legible scrawl, which is why I didn’t notice it before. Obviously, neither did the guy who sold it to me for about $20.
Cool!
The name of the person Molinari is inscribing my book to is pretty much an “illegible scrawl” too. I’m fairly sure about the “Logh,” but the “Henry” is only a bit more than a guess. (I’ll scan it at some point and post the pic and see whether anyone else has a better guess.)