FEYNMAN, RICHARD P. | "SURELY YOU'RE JOKING MR. FEYNMAN". FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY FEYNMAN.

Property from the Estate of Helen Tuck

FEYNMAN, RICHARD P. 

“Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman”. Adventures of a Curious Character. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985

Octavo. Publisher's half orange cloth lettered in gilt, orange board, plain wove endpapers unmarked, all edged trimmed and plain, as issued. In the original pictorial dust-jacket priced $16.95, two blurbs on the lower panel. Housed in a custom clamshell case. One of, if not the finest copy we have ever seen on the market. 

FIRST EDITION, ASSOCIATION COPY SIGNED BY FEYNMAN TO HIS "BELOVED SECRETARY" HELEN TUCK. This is presumably one of the twenty-five 'author's copies' reserved for Feynman by contract (Feynman Papers 27.01) and delivered to his office on or about 12 November 1984, ten weeks before publication (21 January 1985.)

An excellent memoir of the "Rock Star" of physics, "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" was edited from taped conversations between Feynman and his close friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton. Feynman was notorious for refusing to sign copies of his book, reportedly telling his editor "I'm not going to go on TV and I'm not going to sign any books!" - signed copies are thus rare, and were given to his closest friends and family. 

"Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1965, is one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists. As any reader of this book will discover, he 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, to be judged both mentally deficient by a United States Army psychiatrist and worth of the Nobel Prize by the Swedish Academy..." (Book jacket)

PROVENANCE:

Helen Jane Tuck (1927-2010) of Caltech, longtime secretary to Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann; by descent, sold 2018