Edward Teller and Francis Rice set out the principles that govern matter, as physics saw them in 1949

What holds matter together, and why do atoms and molecules take the shapes they do? Francis Owen Rice and Edward Teller wrote this textbook to answer those questions with the quantum physics and chemistry of their day, working from the principles that govern matter up to the structures they produce. John Wiley first published it in 1949.

It was part of Wiley’s Structure of Matter series, with Maria Goeppert Mayer as advisory editor, which places the book among a notable circle of physicists of the mid-twentieth century. For a reader now, it shows how the inside of the atom was taught to students at the end of the 1940s, by two authors who brought chemistry and physics to the same page.

This is the second printing, of April 1952, in navy cloth with gilt on the spine, lightly scuffed and worn, without a dust jacket; the pages sampled show no serious damage. An owner’s entry on the front pastedown, Samuel Silver of Electrical Engineering, may point to the notable American engineer of that name, though nothing on the book confirms it.