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SIGNED, INSCRIBED AND DATED BY AYN RAND TO BARBARA BRANDEN, HER STUDENT, COLLEAGUE AND FUTURE BIOGRAPHER, on Christmas Eve, 1950, the first year of their acquaintance. "To Barbara -- This is the beginning of the line which is for you and me to continue-- Love -- Ayn //December 24, 1950." 

ARISTOTLE. The Basic Works. New York: Random House, [1941]. 8vo. Publisher's red cloth. Stated Ninth Printing. Provenance: From the Library of the Nathaniel Branden Institute (stamp on front pastedown). Provenance: Estate of Barbara Branden. 

"The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge," wrote Ayn Rand in her postscript to Atlas Shrugged (1957), "is to Aristotle.... You will find my tribute to him in the titles of the three parts of Atlas Shrugged." Constituted out of the definitive Oxford translation, Richard McKeon's The Basic Works of Aristotle has been in print as a Random House hardcover for over sixty years. Long considered the best available one-volume Aristotle, McKeon's edition includes selections from Aristotle's Organon, On the Heavens, The Short Physical Treatises, Rhetoric, among others, and On the Soul, On Generation and Corruption, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Poetics in their entirety. "If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle. He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and -- like an axiom -- used by his enemies in the very act of denying him. Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on his achievements" (Rand in The Objectivist Newsletter, 1963). Both Rand's fiction and non-fiction were enormously influenced by Aristotle --"The master of those who know." (Dante) -- making this a gift fraught with significance -- both encouraging and challenging her -- for Barbara Branden, who would become a teacher of Rand's philosophy at Nathaniel Branden Institute. Barbara Branden would go on to be a member of Rand s inner circle through the 1950's and 60's and was a central figure in the schism between Rand and Barbara's husband Nathaniel. Later she wrote the first full-length biography of Rand. 

Scratched boards with edgewear, no jacket. Very neat light pencil underlinings on a few pages within chapters on Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle's "On the Soul" chapter, shows light marginalia on two pages and underlining, presumably in Barbara Branden's pencil, likely for her own course on "The Principles of Efficient Thinking," for Nathaniel Branden Institute, fully endorsed by Rand. No missing pages, binding firm. 

Another presentation book inscribed to Barbara Branden in 1957 sold at auction at Butterfield & Butterfield in 1998 for $18,400 (I was there!).. From the world's largest collection of rare, signed, and manuscript Ayn Rand.