Catalogue Number 12 - Susanne Schulz-Falster

struction (triangular, oval etc.), their reach and strength, how to reduce
smoke and soot, lighting-up times depending on the time of year and
phases of the moon. In a detailed table ‘lighting up’ times are outlined,
which allow for a calculation of the number of hours streetlights would
have to be used per year. He gives extensive comparative examples of the
use, shape and form of streetlights in diVerent European cities, and even
mentions streetlighting in China.
In the second chapter Marperger outlines how street lighting needs to be
administered, the manpower needed, and the hierarchy amongst oYcials,
and their control. The third chapter deals with the question of Wnancing,
either as part of the city responsibilities and payable out of local taxes, or
individual streetlights supported by local benefactors, or, ingeniously as a
business proposal Wnanced by an entrepreneur, who then leases them back
to the city for a fee or rent, which is payable out of taxes. Other suggestions
include a local lottery, funding through the harvest of common lands, a
special tax of Jews active in the city, etc.
A Wnal chapter deals with the illumination of ships and lighthouses, with
detailed reference to naval legislation and custom. He concludes with a few
anecdotes of famous lighthouses.
Paul Jacob Marperger (1656–1730) is generally regarded as the founder
of German business literature. After a career as a merchant during which he
travelled all over Europe he became privy councillor at the Saxon court, and
wrote dozens of technical studies and handbooks of diVerent branches of
industry (Kress Library report of 1984–86).
Goldsmiths’–Kress 6117.1.
The Foundation of Communist Russia
51 MARX, Karl. ��������, ������� ������������ ��������
[Kapital, Kritika Poleticeskoj Ekonomii]. [Translated by Lopatine
and Danielson]. Volume one, St. Petersburg, Poliakof, 1872. £8000
Tall 8vo, pp. xiii, [ii], 678; bound without the half title, faint circular
ink stains to title, with show-through to dedication and Wrst signature;
title page a little creased and reinforced in gutter; loss of a few letters to
verso of last leaf, presumably caused by careless removal of original
wrappers; nineteenth century green cloth, recased, extremities a little
rubbed; a good copy.
First edition in Russian of Marx’s Kapital, in fact the Wrst translation to be
published at all. Its publication led Marx to remark: ‘our success is still
greater in Russia, where Kapital is read and appreciated more than anywhere
else’ (PMM 359).
The publication of the Wrst volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital was the
result of a quarter of a century of economic studies, mostly carried out in
the Reading Room of the British Museum. His biting critique of the capitalist
system had developed from his previous publication Zur Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie, 1859. Das Kapital contained it all, from the theories of
susanne schulz-falster rare books catalogue twelve
value and surplus value, through the dictatorship of the proletariat to the
neo-Hegelian dialectic of materialism, the major Marxist contribution to
the interpretation of history and political economy. The Wrst volume was
the only one to be completed and to be published within Marx’s lifetime.
‘The great scientiWc achievement of Marx lies ... in the details and yet more
in the method and principles of his investigations in his philosophy of history.
Here he has, as is now generally admitted, broken new ground and
opened new ways and outlooks. Nobody before him had so clearly shown
the role of the productive agencies in historical evolution; nobody so masterfully
exhibited their great determining inXuence on the form and ideologies
of social organisms. The passages and chapters dealing with this subject
form ... the crowning parts of his work. If he has been justly compared with
Darwin, it is in these respects that he ranks with the great genius’ (Encyclopaedia
Britannica.)
‘By an odd quirk of history the Wrst foreign translation of Das Kapital to
appear was the Russian, which Petersburgers found in their bookshops
early in April 1872. Giving his imprimatur, the censor, one Skuratov, had
written ‘few people in Russia will read it, and still fewer will understand it.’
He was wrong: the edition of three thousand sold out quickly; and in 1880
Marx was writing to his friend F. A. Sorge that “our success is still greater in
Russia, where Kapital is read and appreciated more than anywhere
else”’(PMM 359).
The printing of another edition in Russia was forbidden and so in 1890 a
second Russian edition was printed in New York. This second edition was
identical to the Wrst but for two small typographical variations: the misplaced
comma opposite p. 73 in the table of contents is replaced by a full
stop; and the e at the end of l. 40 of p. 65 is replaced by c. The present copy
is clearly the Wrst edition.
Printing and the Mind of Man 359; Rubel 33; Mehring, Marx 391; Die Erstdrucke
der Werke v. Marx u. Engels, 1955, S. 33.