A genius’s wealth of knowledge – yours for £800,000
IT was written by Adam Smith more than 200 years ago, and has influenced thinkers across the political spectrum, from Karl Marx to Margaret Thatcher.
Now the Scots economist’s personal first edition of The Wealth of Nations is set to go under the hammer – and is expected to fetch up to £800,000.
The work, first published in two volumes in 1776, took the Enlightenment thinker almost ten years to write, and is seen as the first major work on political economy.
The rare first edition was one of two that Smith kept for his own library.
It will go under the hammer at Christie’s Valuable Books and Manuscripts sale in London on December 12. Experts expect it to sell for between £500,000 and £800,000. When the work originally went on sale, priced at £1 and 16 shillings, the first edition sold out within six months.
Eugenio Donadoni, of Christie’s, said yesterday: ‘The Wealth of Nations cast Adam Smith as an icon of economic liberalism, extolling as it did the necessity of free markets, the division of labour and the mutually beneficial character of exchange.
‘Two copies of the first edition were retained by Smith for his own library – one is lost, the other will be offered for sale.
‘This is a unique opportunity to acquire the author’s own copy of the foundational text of modern economic thought.’
Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, in June 1723, and studied at Glasgow University and Balliol College, Oxford. He published his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations at the age of 52.
The work, published by W Strahan and T Cadell of London, was immediately hailed as ‘excellent’ and ‘profound’.
The Scot, considered the father of modern economics, died in Edinburgh in 1790, aged 67.
The edition for sale was owned in the first half of the 20th century by a professor at Harvard Business School. It is currently owned by a private European collector.
A signed letter from Smith to his publisher William Strahan, from Kirkcaldy, dated November 13, 1776, will also be sold at the Christie’s auction.
The single sheet, valued at £55,000-£80,000, reveals his income from The Wealth of Nations, published earlier that year.
He writes: ‘I have received £300 of the copy money of the first edition of my book. But as I got a good number of copies, to make presents of, from Mr Cadell, I do not exactly know what balance may be due to me. I should, therefore, be glad if he would send me the account.’