[The Blue Book.]

Bookseller Notes

'The 'Blue Book' comprises Wittgenstein's dictated lectures for his course 'Philosophy for Mathematicians' delivered in 1933-34. Wittgenstein, frustrated by the large attendance at the lectures, took the unusual step of dictating to a select group of students, including Alice Ambrose and Francis Skinner, who then circulated copies of the lectures to the rest of the group. From this beginning the 'Blue Book' became a key and influential unpublished work within select philosophical circles in Cambridge and elsewhere - including (to Wittgenstein's annoyance) the philosophy faculty at Oxford - long before its posthumous publication in 1958 (Blackwell). Presenting a copy to Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein wrote: 'Two years ago, or so, I promised to send you a manuscript of mine. Now the one I am sending you to-day isn'tthatmanuscript. I'm still pottering about with it, and God knows whether I will ever publish it, or any of it. But two years ago I held some lectures in Cambridge and dictated some notes to my pupils so that they might have something to carry home with them, in their hands if not in their brains. And I had these notes duplicated. I have just been correcting misprints and other mistakes in some of the copies and the idea came into my mind whether you might not like to have a copy. So I'm sending you one. I don't wish to suggest that you should read the lectures; butifyou should have nothing better to do andifyou should get some mild enjoyment out of them I should be very pleased indeed. (I think it's very difficult to understand them, as so many points are just hinted at. They are meant only for the people who heard the lectures.) As I say, if you don't read themit doesn't matter at all.'Provenance: although there are no marks of provenance (besides the pencil marking of an attentive reader), we are told by the vendor that it formerly belonged to Peter Herbst, professor of philosophy at the Australian National University from 1962 to 1986 (gift to the vendor by Herbst's widow). Herbst might have got the copy from one of the philosophers who introduced Wittgenstein and pioneered "Oxford philosophy" at the university of Melbourne, in the mid-1940s, when he was a student there. The copy might have belonged to G.A. Paul, whom Herbst much admired. If he did not obtain it then, he might well have got it later, during his time in Oxford, mainly at Christ Church, in the early 1950s. For G.A. Paul see Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-century Philosophers, p. 602.