Samuel Smiles, Truth and Work: A Book on Self-Reliance [1868]

Size: 22 cm.

Number of pages: 423.

Binding: Period half-leather.

“Self-Help” by the Scottish physician Samuel Smiles (1859) sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Smiles argued that a person’s fate depends primarily on their work, perseverance, integrity, and thrift. Examples included the biographies of inventors and engineers such as James Watt and George Stephenson, the son of a miner who learned to read as an adult. The book was published in Polish as *Prawdą a pracą*: first in Warsaw in 1867, translated by the team at *Przegląd Tygodniowy* under the direction of Adam Wiślicki, and a year later in Kraków, at W. Kirchmayer’s *Czas* printing house. After 1863, the program of work, learning, and self-improvement reached Polish readers as the motto of Positivism.

On the title page is a dry seal reading “Felicyan Szybalski”; on the reverse is a stamp reading “Wydawnictwo Dzieł Tanich i Pożytecznych,” a Kraków-based educational initiative founded in 1866.

Original period half-leather binding.

An item from the 18th Polish Antiquarian Book Auction.