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'The better half of the first edition of Leviathan'. Hobbes began writing Leviathan in Paris having fled there in 1640 as he saw the Civil War approaching. It was finished in early 1651 and sent to London to Hobbes's publisher, Andrew Crooke at the Green Dragon in St Paul's Churchyard. There are three editions all with the date 1651 and all three have Andrew Crooke as their printer. They are known as the 'Head' edition, the 'Bear' edition and the 'Ornaments' edition - after the decorations on their title pages. Virtually all subsequent editions from that of 1750 (except Sir William Molesworth's The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, 1839) through to the editions of the late twentieth century took the first edition of Leviathan of 1651 - the Head edition - to be definitive; from it, the subsequent editions are more or less wholly derived. The Bear and the Ornaments editions were regarded as pirated editions, probably printed in Holland, and therefore unconnected with Hobbes himself. But in the Introduction to their definitive critical edition of Leviathan (Thoemmes, 2003) G.A.J. Rogers and Karl Schuhmann demonstrated that this traditional picture is substantially wrong. Both the Bear and Ornaments editions contain corrections and changes by Hobbes himself: 'It is clear beyond all reasonable doubt that the Bear edition contains about thirty changes - a number of a scale that, in seventeenth-century terms, one can expect author's corrections in a work of the size of Leviathan to amount to - that unequivocally derive from Hobbes. A plausible hypothesis is that the stylistic and doctrinal corrections by Hobbes - for which one seeks in vain among the different copies of the Head edition - are the ones to be found in the Bear edition. On this reading the Bear edition would be, so to speak, nothing but the second and (with regard to the Hobbesian corrections it incorporates) better half of the first edition of Leviathan' (pp. 145-6). PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Folio, Bear device on title-page, additional engraved title-page, [vi], folding table, 1-248, 247-256, 261-394 [i.e. 396] pp. (text continuous with the usual irregular paginations, 126 for 219, 337 for 335, 361 for 391, 397 for 395, 394 for 396), contemporary panelled calf, rubbed and with wear at edges, spine with red morocco label, joints cracked but cords holding firm, armorial bookplate of William Wilshere, Ff2 with short marginal tear, some sections with uniform light browning, isolated spots, no inscriptions, a good unsophisticated copy of the Bear edition, housed in a protective cloth box.

Leviathan is a book written by Thomas Hobbes which concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory.