A Treatise of Algebra: Wherein the Principles are Demonstrated, and Applied in Many Useful and Interesting Inquiries, and in the Resolution of a Great Variety of Problems of Different Kinds.

Second American edition, revised, corrected and improved. Octavo. 408pp. Rebound in modern quarter brown morocco and cloth boards, with morocco label gilt. Binding has light wear, and a slight crease to one corner, and is near fine; there is foxing and edgewear in the text, overall very good. Joseph Ray's copy with his ownership signature and the price he paid for the book on the first blank: "Joseph Ray, Cincinnati, Ohio. $1.50." Also laid in between page 280 and 281 is a small slip of paper (approximately 4" x 5") signed "Ray" and with complex equations on each side. Ray was a professor of mathematics and wrote several books on the subject, beginning in 1834 with *An Introduction to Ray's Eclectic Arithmetic,* the first of a series of six textbooks which became the most popular and widely used American mathematics textbooks of the Nineteenth Century. They also formed the basis for *Ray's Mathematical Series* of textbooks. As late as 1913, annual sales exceeded a quarter of a million copies a year, and total sales of the arithmetic books alone are estimated at 120 million copies. The success of Ray's *Arithmetic* series prompted his publisher to seek an author for a set of readers. They chose William Holmes McGuffey, who joined Ray on the faculty of Woodward College, and where he wrote the *McGuffey Readers* which surpassed even Ray's *Arithmetics* to become the most popular textbooks ever written.…