The Scarce First US Edition of The Meaning of Relativity, a Foundational Text in Science, Signed by its Author, Albert Einstein

When these signed copies can be found, they are typically from much later printings

In 1905, a young patent clerk and physicist in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein, obtained his doctorate and published a paper that espoused his newly developed Special Theory of Relativity. This unlocked many mysteries of the universe, and introduced the world to “E=mc2,” equating mass and the speed of light with energy. It established that time and space are not fixed, and in fact change to maintain a constant speed of light regardless of the relative motions of sources and observers. It showed space as a four dimensional universe, with time added as the fourth dimension. Just 10 years later, in 1915, Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, in which gravitational effects are explained by the warping of space-time. In this theory, Einstein incorporated gravity as a geometric property of space-time. This expanded upon Special Relativity to describe the overall structure of the universe and the impulses of a gravitational universe. The two theories built on each other and were intimately related.

The book “The Meaning of Relativity,” also known as Four Lectures of Relativity, is Einstein’s definitive exposition of his special and general theories of relativity. These were the formative years of relativity in which the theory essentially received the structure in which it later became one of the pillars of modern physics.

By December 1922, the final proofs of the German edition of this book had been printed and sent to Ilse Einstein for review. There were near concurrent publishings of this great work at Aberdeen University and Princeton. The official US publication date is January 12, 1923, while its printing by Aberdeen University Press and its copyright were registered as 1922. The same book had been produced for Methuen by the same printers and must have been released only a few weeks earlier in the UK.

Book signed, the first American edition, his first book published in America, of Einstein’s historic Princeton lectures, “The Meaning of Relativity”, issued mere weeks after the English edition, a real rarity, signed and dated by Einstein during his time in California in 1931. It bears an additional ownership signature of the man for whom Einstein must have signed it, who has pasted in an image of Einstein opposite his signature.