Atticus Rare Books

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985 [EXCEPTIONALLY RARE AUTHOR’S ADVANCE PROOF COPY OF THE FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY FEYNMAN]

Feynman, Richard P. [Phillips]

1st Edition. EXCEPTIONALLY RARE AUTHOR’S ADVANCE PROOF COPY OF THE FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY FEYNMAN. On or about November 12th, 1984, Feynman received a box of 16-25 advance proof copies of his book. Set to release on January 21st, 1985, the copies were required by contract with his publisher so that he might gift them to friends and colleagues (Feynman Papers 27.01). Like this one, all advance copies are identified by the publisher’s very faint stamp “43546” on the top of the front free endpaper. Signed in ink by Feynman on the half-title. Famous for refusing to sign copies of his works, signed copies are thus rare. Fine condition.

The American theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman was a brilliant and influential scientist and iconoclast who, in addition to winning a Nobel Prize, played the bongo drums, loathed intellectual pretension and scientific jargon, and who had a gift for explaining complex ideas simply and with clarity and humor. He approached everything, be it safecracking or biology, with the same playfulness and curiosity he brought to physics. And yes, he did crack safes – and at Los Alamos.  

“Feynman had begun to have autobiographical thoughts around the time of the Nobel Prize. Historians came by to record his recollections… Interviewers set up tape recorders to capture every word of the same stories he had entertained his friends with for decades.”

But Feynman “had never read a scientific biography he had liked. He thought he would be portrayed either as a bloodless intellectual or a bongo-playing clown. He vacillated and finally let the idea drop.”

The idea lay dormant until the late 70s when Feynman began spending time with Ralph Leighton, son of Robert Leighton, a close colleague of Feynman’s. Ralph and Feynman became friends through shared interests  —  particularly in drumming and storytelling.

Leighton “began taping the stories Feynman would tell. He urged him on, calling him Chief and begging to hear the same stories again and again. Feynman told them: how he became known in Far Rockaway as the boy who fixed radios by thinking; how he asked a Princeton librarian for the map of the cat; how his father taught him to see through the tricks of circus mind readers; how he outwitted painters, mathematicians, philosophers, and psychiatrists. Or he would just ramble while Leighton listened…” (Gleick, James. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, 408-411).

Their conversations — informal yet always full of anecdotes from Feynman’s life — eventually became the basis for this book. With Leighton recording, transcribing, and organizing these stories into a loose autobiographical format that captured Feynman’s humor, curiosity, and approach to life, “gradually, a manuscript began to take shape” (ibid).

The jacket blurb on the resultant book, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! perhaps describes him best: "Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1965, is one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists… Hwe is also a man who has fallen, often jumped, into adventure. Feynman's life has in fact been a series of combustible combinations, improbable happenings made possible by his unique mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, eternal skepticism, and raging chutzpah. Feynman is perhaps the only person in the history of the world to solve the mystery of liquid helium and to be commissioned to paint a naked (female) toreador, to crack many of the most 'secure' safes at Los Alamos during development of the atomic bomb and to play a skillful frigideira in a Brazilian samba band, to explain physics to 'monster minds' like Einstein, Von Neumann, and Pauli, and to accompany ballet on the bongo drums, and to be judged both mentally deficient by a United States Army psychiatrist and worth of the Nobel Prize by the Swedish Academy..." Item #1685

CONDITION & DETAILS: Octavo. Bound in original red half cloth, with original pictorial dust jacket with very slight fading at the spine. Note that the dust jacket is the correct first issue with two quotes on the rear, one from Dyson and one from Bethe. A rare work in fine condition.

Signed copies of this book are notoriously rare. Feynman never understood why people collect autographs. He asked one collector, “Could you please write and explain it to me?” To another he wrote, “I’m sorry to have to inform you that I do not send autographs”; and then he signed the letter, thereby sending an autograph. Requests for Feynman’s signature were referred routinely to his secretary, who instead replied with a printed card saying firmly that “Professor Feynman has found it necessary to refuse all requests for autographs”. The result of all this is that Feynman’s signature is rare & prized.

Price: $17,500.00