Footnotes

The so-called "Blue Book" emerged from the lectures Wittgenstein gave for his course "Philosophy for Mathematicians" from November 1933 to June 1934. Overwhelmed by the numbers attending his lectures he took to dictating them to a select group of his Cambridge students, who circulated copies to other students. A certain "number of copies were taken and circulated to friends and pupils by Wittgenstein himself... Of both dictations ["The Brown Book" comprised dictations from 1935-36] clandestinely made copies came into circulation against Wittgenstein's wishes....In future scholarly editions of the text, it may be worth while to pay attention to variations between the copies" (G.H. von Wright, "The Wittgenstein Papers" in The Philosophical Review Vol. 78, No. 4, October 1969). The lecture notes were only published in book form, by Blackwell, in 1958.

There appear unsurprisingly to be several typescript variants. Our copy is headed "Wittgenstein Dictations" above a 14-line note on the genesis of the "Blue Books" on an unnumbered leaf, followed by 79 numbered pages typed on the recto only. On the opening and final leaf is a decorative typed ornament, and at the foot of the final page the word 'Sylvagard'.

Provenance: Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001), student, friend and translator of Wittgenstein [see note below]; D.J. O'Connor (1914-2012), a student of A.J. Ayer and Karl Popper, who was appointed head of the philosophy department at Exeter University in 1957; gifted by him to Brian Carr, a colleague from the department (and writer of O'Connor's Guardian obituary, 18 September 2012), co-editor with his wife Indira Mahalingam of The Companion Encyclopaedia of Asian Philosophy, Routledge, 1997; Indira Carr, the vendor.

A note typed by O'Connor, on the verso of one of his compliment slips, reads "Brian. Is this of interest? It is one of the copies of the original 'Blue Book' shorthand versions - on which, I am told, a curse rests [followed in ink] P.S. I got it from a pupil of [Elizabeth] Anscombe's. D[aniel]". Anscombe "arrived in Cambridge in 1942 [where] she became a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein... [who came to be] a friend as well as a mentor and lodged with Anscombe and her family in Oxford from April 1950 to February 1951. He named her in his will as one of his executors and entrusted her with translating his manuscripts" (ODNB). In addition to several translations of his work, she also published An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1959).