The Computer Artist's Handbook: Concepts, Techniques and Applications

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. Hardcover. Foreword by Arno Penzias. Small 4to. Blue cloth and purple paper over boards, price-clipped dust jacket. xxiii, 318pp. Numerous color illustrations. Near fine/near fine. Tight, superb first edition of this important text -- and a unique presentation copy as well, for Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Penzias, who provides the book's foreword, boldly inscribes and signs this copy in blue fineline on the half-title page: "To Joe Olive / With continuing appreciation / Arno Penzias / Oct 1995." Olive was another high-level Bell Labs physicist, along with Penzias himself. It was while working for Bell Labs in 1964 that Penzias first discovered the radio noise that resulted in findings supporting the Big Bang theory -- and the 1978 Nobel Prize. Also laid into this copy is a 1p 8½" X 11" e-mail printout to Penzias which Penzias enclosed in this copy; the congratulatory text from a researcher thanking Penzias for his help at a seminar and mentioning Olive -- which is why Penzias sent Olive this printout, on which he circles the mention of Olive and boldly pens across it "Joe / Thanks again / Arno." An unusual copy!