LARDNER, Dionysius.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Railway Economy: First edition of the first book collected by Herbert Somerton Foxwell (1849-1936), whose extensive collections now form the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature at the University of London and the Kress Library of Business and Economics at Harvard.In his article "Herbert Somerton Foxwell" (Economic Journal, Dec. 1936), J. M. Keynes documents the beginning of Foxwell's bibliomania, which Jevons first encouraged. "It began in 1875, when Jevons, walking with Foxwell in Great Portland Street, persuaded him to buy Lardner's Railway Economy from a bookstall. In the course of the next sixty years Foxwell acquired above 70,000 volumes. The perusal of second-hand book catalogues, the selection, purchase and reading of fresh discoveries, their annotating, cataloging and binding came to occupy over many years a great part of his time and thought."Lardner's Railway Economy is important: it places him in the nineteenth century tradition of Dupuit and Ellet, students of engineering and transportation who in the course of research formulated principles of pure economics which anticipated marginal analysis and its mathematical methods. Lardner (1793-1859) is noted particularly for his contribution to the theories of profit maximisation and price discrimination related to location. Not only is his method mathematical, it also utilises graphic presentation (Chapter XIII, p. 288).

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