First editions, an exceptionally rare presentation copy, inscribed by Whitehead on the front free endpapers of volumes I and II to his only sister, Shirley Maria Whitehead (1858-1943), “S.M.W. from A.N.W.”, and dated “March 13 / 12” in the second volume (preceding publication in April).
In 1891 Shirley Maria married Alfred’s former Sherborne School mathematics master, the Rev. John Blanch (1842-1907), whom Alfred held in high esteem - in 1898 he presented him with an inscribed copy of his first book, Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications. The marriage however is recorded as unhappy by Victor Lowe in his biography of Whitehead, and Blanch died by suicide in 1907, before the publication of the Principia Mathematica. Shirley continued to reside in Cambridge, where both Russell and Whitehead studied, and where they collaborated in writing the Principia.
To our knowledge the only other presentation copy to have appeared on the market was that in the collection of Haskell F. Norman, which was presented to the mathematical philosopher Philip Jourdain. That copy, however, had only presentation slips from the publisher, rather than being inscribed directly by an author as here - it garnered $129,000 in the Norman sale in 1998.
The authors are known to have sent complimentary copies to the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, of which they both were or had been Fellows, to R. G. Hawtrey, who checked over some of the text while it was in preparation, to G. G. Berry, a clerk at the Bodleian Library with remarkable abilities in mathematical logic, and to Jourdain. The University Press sent copies to G. Peano, G. Frege, L. Couturat, J. Royce, W. E. Johnson (who had examined the manuscript for the Press), E. W. Hobson, and A. R. Forsyth. We cannot trace the location of any of these copies, other than Jourdain’s and the copy remaining in Trinity College, Cambridge.
In the Principia, Whitehead and Russell attempted to construct “the whole body of mathematical doctrine by logical deduction from the basis of a small number of primitive ideas and a small number of primitive principles of logical inference” (DSB, XII, p. 14). This ‘logicist’ position holds that mathematics is as a branch of logic, and thus “that a separate philosophy of mathematics does not exist, a view contradicting the Kantian doctrine that mathematical proofs depend on a priori forms of intuition ... the three colossal volumes of Principia Mathematica ... formed the greatest single contribution to symbolic logic for the time” (ODNB). Russell wrote to Helen Flexner that he doubted anyone would read it all the way through, and it is renowned for its extraordinary complexity and impenetrability, yet nonetheless, it has been correctly called “one of the most impressive intellectual monuments of the twentieth century” (ibid.). A fourth volume, dealing with the applications to geometry, was planned but never finished, as both men turned their attention away from mathematics and towards philosophy.
Aside from the desirable presentation, this is one of only 500 possible complete sets - the first volume was printed in 750 copies, but the publishers reduced the printings of volumes II and III to 500 copies each. John Slater, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and editor of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, suggests that there are probably fewer than 50 sets surviving in private hands.