FEYNMAN, RICHARD. "QED: THE STRANGE THEORY OF LIGHT AND MATTER." FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, 1985. SIGNED BY FEYNMAN

8vo. 158 pp. Publisher's black cloth, with laid endpapers and spine lettered in violet; in a later dust-jacket. A fine copy. INSCRIBED AND SIGNED ON FLY-LEAF "TO JIM COMPEAU, / WITH GRATITUDE AND BEST WISHES / RALPH / RICHARD."

James Gleick Genius: The life and science of Richard Feynman (1992), page 13; P. H. DeTurk PS 2001: The story of the Pasadena Alternative School (1974), chapter 9 passim; NB: Leighton’s contribution to this book was such that Feynman granted him 23% of his royalties

FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING, PRESENTATION COPY, SIGNED BY BOTH FEYNMAN AND LEIGHTON, of Feynman’s last book, a vivid exposition of quantum electrodynamics by its greatest master. This was the heart of Feynman’s work, and precisely the field in which he’d won his Nobel Prize — that is, for his “fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles”. Distilled from a series of lectures at UCLA in 1983, this book was Feynman’s only non-technical account of the subject: Gleick calls it a model of science writing.  Signed familiarly “Ralph” and “Richard” — that is, Ralph Leighton and Richard Feynman. First-name signatures of Feynman are excessively rare, this being the only such signed copy on the market in twenty years or more; signed scientific books, rather than copies of his popular memoirs, are themselves excessively rare, this being one of only three examples seen on the market in decades. The recipient was James Lee Compeau (b. 1937), the brilliant and original teacher to whom the Feynmans had entrusted their own son. 

Jim Compeau was the leading light and “folk hero” of Pasadena’s Alternative School — and not unlike Feynman himself, Compeau too was celebrated for “his antagonism toward bureaucracy, his disregard for genteel language, his . . . irreverent political pronouncements, his . . . ridicule of most schooling practice, his tolerance of any behavior from others, his . . . subversiveness within an institutional framework, and his utter unconventionality”.