A Handbook on Curves and Their Properties

At first glance, Robert C. Yates? ?A Handbook on Curves and Their Properties? might appear to be a regular teacher?s manual. That?s not quite it, though. It is more of reference book which Yates says in his preface is designed for both student and teacher??a collection of information which might be found useful in the classroom and in engineering practice,? to directly quote that preface. Reviews at the time of the book?s publication in 1947 were enthusiastic, saying it was a kind of missing link that could help both high school and college teachers of elementary calculus and analytical geometry expand on what they find in textbooks and broaden their own knowledge. ?[T]his book is a veritable mine of interesting enrichment material? This is the teacher?s handbook for which many of us have long wished,? said the review in ?The Mathematics Teacher.? Both that writer and the critic who reviewed the book for The Mathematical Association?s journal ?The Mathematical Gazette? practically insisted that it go into school libraries, and praised the physical quality of the book, with its 211 ?neat,? ?clear,? and ?helpful? diagrams, not to mention the solid, attractive binding. The book continued to be held in high regard well after those early reviews. It was reissued several times, albeit with a slightly altered title?it became simply ?Curves and their Properties??and in the 1970s the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics added it to its ?Classics in Mathematics Education? series of books. There is a bit of an issue about which edition this copy belongs to. The book reviews quoted here were for the edition released in 1947, which is when our copy was released, but the author, who was a professor of mathematics at West Point, originally wrote it for West Point use only. He did allow fellow mathematicians to read it and comment on it, which they did, enthusiastically praising it. That doesn?t mean they let the occasional error slide, though, and had some suggestions for improvements, so when it was published for use outside of the Mathematics Department of the U.S. Military Academy, sections were expanded, there were more notes, and an errata sheet was included. But as this 1947 edition was the first one the general public saw, and the first one published by a national publisher for wide release, is it the first edition, or the second? There?s no mention of either on the title or the copyright page; it remains debatable. Either way, the dark blue bookcloth binding is still in remarkable condition for a book almost 80 years old, living up to the praise heaped on it by original critics. There are no bumps on the boards, and actually very little in the way of aging visible at all, besides a touch of shelf wear at the top and bottom of the spine. The lettering for the author?s name and the title is blind stamped on the spine and is scuffed in a couple of places, but the letters are still intact. The previous owner?s name--Roland A Hueston, Jr., teacher of math and physics and later headmaster at Boston?s Chauncy Hall school and the Chapel-Hill Chauncy Hall school after a merger?is written on the top of the front pastedown, and there is a small doodle at the bottom. (The name ?Chauncy Hall School? is rubber stamped on the top and bottom edges of the text block, but this copy was purchased from Hueston?s private collection, not from the school's lending library.) These are the only marks anywhere in the interior of the book. Some scuffing from what was probably a bookplate that was later removed appears on the first free endpaper. There is some pulling at the seam at the title page, and what looks like the shadow of the glue from the pastedown; similar pulling appears at the last page of the index. However, the binding overall is adequately tight and there are no loose or missing pages. In our copy, the errata page has been bound into the text block in the first signature, between the table of contents and the preface; it appears to have.…