For someone so mindbogglingly famous, Wittgenstein published remarkably little in his lifetime. Comically little, in fact. Alongside the Tractatus—which appeared first in German as the last number of Wilhelm Ostwald’s Annalen der Naturphilosophie, then in English a year later in 1922—there was an acerbic book review in 1913, a children’s dictionary in 1926, and a short essay in 1929. Two books, two papers. Original philosophical output: half that. (He also built a house.)
All, of course, are glorious rarities. WorldCat locates no copies of the dictionary, though one went through Modern First Editions recently, and Quaritch offered the proofs for £75,000. The Tractatus comes up every once in a while, but sells for many thousands; in the German original it went for remarkably little (i.e. £5000+) in 2001 at Christie’s. The book review is the least impressive of these, but still, single issues of the Cambridge Review are hard to come by.
What of the other paper? Well, it was the printed version of a talk Wittgenstein had given to the Aristotelian Society, and it appeared in a supplement to their Proceedings, entitled ‘Knowledge, Experience and Realism’. It seems to have been a pretty well-attended symposium; other papers are by G.E. Moore, Gilbert Ryle, L.S. Stebbing, etc. Between various sessions Wittgenstein gave a separate address, entitled ‘Some Remarks on Logical Form’.
So this is the ‘other’ Wittgenstein—at least philosophically speaking. And it’s the other Wittgenstein in another sense—they got his name wrong on the title-page: “F. Wittgenstein”.
The copy I’m offering is particularly nice, because it comes in the original grey wrappers; most copies are bound in blue cloth-covered boards. It’s not quite clear why it was issued like this. It’s conceivable that contributors’ or proof copies were printed without boards, possible too that this was available at the conference itself. In any case, with Wittgenstein manuscripts regularly selling for many thousands, I’ve decided to list this for £2600 [sold].
