DODGSON, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll). Curiosa Mathematica. Part II, Pillow Problems Thought Out During Sleepless Nights. (FIRST EDITION - 1893)

AUTHOR: DODGSON, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll)

TITLE: Curiosa Mathematica. Part II, Pillow Problems Thought Out During Sleepless Nights.

PUBLISHER: London: Horace Hart for Macmillan, 1893.

DESCRIPTION: FIRST EDITION. 1 vol., diagrammatic frontispiece. Bound in the original black stamped tan cloth.

CONDITION: Spine relined at an earlier date, original cloth spine paid down, inner hinges fine, some minor foxing to pastedowns and endpapers otherwise internally clean and bright, overall generally a GOOD+ copy.

REFERENCE: WMG&C #246.

ADDITIONAL  INFORMATION: The first edition of Part II is particularly scarce because on publication of the second edition, in August of the same year, Dodgson asked Macmillan to stop supplying copies of this first edition, and to recall those already in the hands of agents, replacing them with copies of the new edition.
The great majority of the seventy-two problems of "Curiosa Mathematica", chiefly in Algebra, Plane Geometry or Trigonometry, were 'almost all mentally worked out in the night, without a word or line put on paper till the daylight came. The Introduction describes the method of calculation, and states that Dodgson generally wrote the answer first, then the question and solution! He could distinctly visualize complicated diagrams in the dark, such as the frontispiece ... He published the problems to encourage the pastime as a means of avoiding undesired thought by concentration on a subject' (WMGC p. 181).