Books & Manuscripts, including Americana

Together, 43 volumes, with contributions, many in journals and periodicals, some offprints, by Claude E. Shannon, Francis Bello, Amiel Feinstein, Paul Weiss, Warren Weaver, Robert Fano, Norbert Wiener, W.R. Bennett, Harry Nyquist, W.M. Miner, Robert G. Gallager, and others. Most are in original bindings and housed in custom folding cases. A complete list of titles is available upon request.

Communications theory is a branch of applied mathematics concerned with the transmission, processing, and interpretation of information. Developed in the mid-twentieth century, most notably through the work of Claude Shannon, it established a quantitative framework for measuring information, encoding messages, and minimizing error in noisy channels. Central concepts include entropy, which measures the uncertainty or information content of a message, and channel capacity, the theoretical limit of reliable transmission. These principles have underpinned modern telecommunications, computing, and data compression, shaping the development of digital networks and information systems.

This archive includes:

1) HARTLEY, Ralph. "Transmissions of Information." In: Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp.535-563, July 1928. Original printed wrappers. THIS PAPER COINED THE WORD "INFORMATION" (in a technical sense), making explicitly clear for the first time that information in this context was a measurable quantity. Cited by Shannon in "A Mathematical Theory of Communication."

2) NYQUIST, Harry. "Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed." In: Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, Vol. 43, pp. 412-422. New York, 1924. Original cloth. Nyquist proposes that the number of independent pulses that can be transmitted through a telegraph channel per unit time is limited to twice the channel's bandwidth. This expanded version was cited by Shannon in "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" and "Communication in the Presence of Noise."

3) NYQUIST. "Certain Topics in Telegraph Transmission Theory." In: Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp.617-644, April 1928. Original printed wrappers. NYQUIST'S RARE FOUNDATIONAL PAPER ESTABLISHING HIS SAMPLING THEOREM. Nyquist uses Fourier analysis to demonstrate that the maximum signaling rate of a channel with bandwidth W is 2W and proposes three criteria for distortionless signal transmission. Cited by Shannon in "Communication in the Presence of Noise."

4) WIENER, Norbert. Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine. [Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Technology Press for] New York: John Wiley & Sons; Paris: Hermann et Cie, 1948. Original red cloth stamped in black; dust jacket. FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, printed offset from the typesetting of the French edition, of the first conventionally published book (rather than a technical report) to include a serious discussion of electronic computing.

5) SHANNON, Claude E. (his copy), B.M. Oliver, and J.R., Pierce. "The Philosophy of PCM." In: Bell Telephone System Technical Publications, Monograph B-1611. New York, 1948. Original printed wrappers. Provenance: Claude E. Shannon (1916-2001), American polymath (unmarked); sold by Kuenzig Books (with catalogue note stating authorization to sell this book by Shannon's descendants). CLAUDE SHANNON'S FILE COPY OF THE VERY RARE FIRST (AND ONLY) SEPARATE EDITION OF THIS BELL MONOGRAPH. Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) is a method of digitally representing analog signals by sampling their amplitude at regular intervals and quantizing each sample into a binary value. These binary values are then encoded and transmitted or stored, allowing accurate reconstruction of the original signal within the limits of the sampling rate and resolution. While the foundations for PCM were laid many years before, Shannon, Oliver, and Pierce were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for its invention.

6) SHANNON. "Communications in the Presence of Noise." In: Proceedings of the I.R.E., Vol. 37, No. 1, January, 1949. Original two-toned cloth. Collected journal issue. FIRST APPEARANCE of Shannon's important extension of his seminal 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." [With:] 4 other earlier titles relating to the invention and development of the sampling theorem.

7) SHANNON. "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." In: The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, Nos. 3-4, pp.[379]-423 & [623]-656. New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Company, July-October 1948.  2 parts, 8vo. Original printed blue wrappers. FIRST EDITION, the first appearance of Shannon's mathematical theory of communication. A seminal work on information theory, essential to the development of computer technology and the foundation of the modern information age. Origins of Cyberspace 880; Tomash & Williams S94-95. [With:] SHANNON. "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems." In: The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp.656-715, October 1949.

8) SHANNON. "The Synthesis of Two-Terminal Switching Circuits." In: The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp.59-98, January 1949. Original printed wrappers. Shannon applies Boolean algebra circuit design methods to demonstrate that any circuit synthesis problem can be decomposed into a set of simpler problems, each corresponding to a function, to minimize the number of switches for a given task.

9) SHANNON, ET AL. "Communications Theory - Exposition of Fundamentals." [And:] The Lattice Theory of Information." In: Transactions of the I.R.E. London, 1953, pp.44-47 and 102-107. Original wrappers (rebacked, covers toned). Other contributors include Denis Gabor and Alan Turing.

10) SHANNON. "Zero error capacity of a noisy channel." In: Bell Telephone System Technical Publications, Monograph 2760. New York, 1956. Original printed wrappers. First published by I.R.E. in 1956, Shannon uses combinatorial graph theory to determine the zero-error capacity of a noisy channel, defined as the least upper bound of rates at which information can be transmitted with zero probability of error.

11) SHANNON. "Certain Results in Coding Theory for Noisy Channels." In: Information and Control, Vol. 1, No. 1, September 1957. Original upper wrapper (lower in facsimile). Provenance: Space Tech Labs, Inc (rubberstamp on upper cover dated 1963). Proves the "channel coding theorem for memoryless channels" that he proposed in his Mathematical Theory of Communication based on "information density." Origins of Cyberspace 895.

12) SHANNON. "Probability of Error for Optimal Codes in Gaussian Channel." In: The Bell System Technical Journal, Volume 38, No. 3, pp.611-656, May 1959. Original printed wrappers. Shannon's introduction of the "reliability function," the exponent of the minimum achievable probability of error as a function of signaling rate.

13) SHANNON. "Coding Theorems for a Discrete Source with a Fidelity Criterion." In: IRE National Convention Record, Part 4, pp.142-163, New York, 1959. Original printed wrappers. This paper lays out the basic tenets of rate distortion theory that helped spark the development of compression techniques for audio, video, and still images.