Presented by Ben Houston of Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Rare first edition of the first volume of Das Kapital, the only one to appear in Marx’s lifetime; one of 1,000 copies printed. Two further volumes were published from his manuscripts by Engels, in 1885 and 1894 respectively.
The first volume of Das Kapital was published on 14 September 1867 in Hamburg, issued in printed wrappers. “Marx himself modestly described Das Kapital as a continuation of his Zur Kritik de politischen Oekonomie, 1859. It was in fact the summation of his quarter of a century’s economic studies, mostly in the Reading Room of the British Museum.
The Athenaeum reviewer of the first English translation (1887) later wrote: ‘Under the guise of a critical analysis of capital, Karl Marx’s work is principally a polemic against capitalists and the capitalist mode of production, and it is this polemical tone which is its chief charm’.
UPDATE – BOOK SOLD
