Definition of term:: Residue (Stickerghost)

As in "sticker residue" or "tape residue" - once upon a time long ago, the book in question had a sticker or tape on it, someone removed the latter, but some of the adhesive or some evidence of it still remains.

Johannem Riewerts, Amstelodami [Amsterdam] 1663 - TP + [i]-[vii] = Præfatio + [viii] = Ad Librum + [ix]-[xiv] = Index + 1-90 + [91] = half-title _ 93-140; Small Quarto. First Edition. (Kingma-Offenberg 1)First Edition of Spinoza's First Book - Explicating Descartes.Spinoza's first work is the only one published during his lifetime that identified him as the author and had the correct information on the printer-publisher. Spinoza's two later works (Tractatus & Opera) were very much his own radical thought (rather than a reworking of Descartes ideas as here) and so were necessarily published anonymously and listing false information about the printer-publisher on the title page. He radical nature of Spinoza's thought and the dangers of publishing such materials in this time and place are brilliantly explained in Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment (Oxford, 2001). Here Spinoza presents an exposition of Cartesian philosophy but he has recast it using his own geometrical method of reasoning and presentation. The origins of this work are interesting and clearly explained by the author himself in a letter to his friend, Oldenburg, that was written shortly after publication: "Some of my friends asked me to make them a copy of a treatise containing a precise account of the Second Part of Descartes' Principia Philosophiæ [1644], demonstrated in the geometric style, and of the main points treated in metaphysics. Previously, I had dictated this to a certain young man to whom I did not want to teach my own opinions openly. They asked me to prepare the First Part also by the same method, as soon as I could. Not to disappoint my friends, I immediately undertook to do this and finished it in two weeks. I delivered it to my friends, who in the end asked me to let them publish the whole work. They easily won my agreement, on the condition that one of them [Lodewijk Meyer], in my presence, would provide it with a more elegant style and add a short preface warning readers that I did not acknowledge all the opinions contained in this treatise as my own, since I had written many things in it which were the opposite of what I held, and illustrating this by one or two examples. One of my friends, to whose care the publishing of this little book has been entrusted, has promised to do all this and that is why I stayed for a while in Amsterdam." (Nadler, Spinoza, A Life, p. 205)This rather straightforward - though completely reformatted - exposition of Descartes is followed by the Cogita Metaphysica (Metaphysical Thoughts- pp. 91-140 - with its own title page) which is written from the Cartesian perspective (defending, for instance, the freedom of the will) but with some serious foreshadowing of Spinoza's later doctrines. Contemporary vellum boards professionallhy rebacked with a nicely matching vellum spine. With two small contemporary annotations fading ink on pages 122 & 124 (4 lines & 6 lines respectively). Overall, a lovley copy of this first and rather rare work by Spinoza. PHOTOS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST. Less