A Brief History of Time, From the Big Bang to Black Holes
Price: $500.00
Hard Cover. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. First American Edition. Fine / Dust Jacket Included.
Illustrations by Ron Miller. Introduction by Carl Sagan. First American edition, first issue, with the full number line to copyright page, and the called-for errors including no dedication statement and no table of contents page. Publisher's black cloth-backed paper-covered boards, with Hawking's initials stamped to front board, spine stamped in silver foil, and pale blue endpapers; in its original blue dust jacket, with a photo of Hawking attributed to David Montgomery to front panel, and black lettering. Fine book; fine unclipped dust jacket, with bookseller sticker to rear panel. Overall, a very fresh copy of this landmark book in popular science. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking "shows us how mankind's 'world picture' evolved from the time of Aristotle through the 1915 breakthrough of Albert Einstein, to the exciting ideas of today's prominent young physicists." Some of the weighty subjects covered in this modern classic are the expanding universe, black holes, the origin and fate of the universe, the "arrow of time," and unification theory. In Hawking's introduction, he explains that he was told by his publisher that his readership would be halved for every equation that he included in the book. As a result, it has only one equation: Einstein's E=mc2. A Brief History of Time stayed on the bestseller list for an astounding 237 weeks and sold so many copies that by 1998 there was one copy for every 750 people on earth. Notably, this American first edition of the book was quickly recalled because it was, in Hawking's words, "full of errors, with misplaced and erroneously labeled photographs and diagrams." Item #SWH001
