The 55th Australian Antiquarian Book Fair

The Melbourne Rare Book Fair 2025 will be held Thursday 31 July to Saturday 2 August 2025

presented by ANZAAB with the support of the University of Melbourne.

About the Fair, History of the Fair

Last Year's Fair

Featured Exhibitor

INLIBRIS

Founded in 1883 in Vienna, where their main offices are still located, Antiquariat Inlibris is among the most reputable companies in the industry. With a stock of no fewer than 50,000 items they form one of the largest non-institutional, privately owned repositories of rare books, historical manuscripts and autographs. Over the past century they have served the most renowned universities, museums, and national libraries worldwide by supplying them with collections as well as with individual items of the utmost importance and rarity. Today, the company is represented through registered branches in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, maintaining offices in Vienna, New York City, and Sharjah (UAE).

Featured Highlights

DOUGLAS, William Bloomfield. Diary kept while captain of a mail ship, commander of a government coastal survey, and government resident of the Northern Territory.

$104500

Peter Harrington

The valuable journal of the overly ambitious and power-hungry Captain Bloomfield Douglas, encompassing three important aspects of Australian colonial history: the evolution of the colony’s communications with the wider world, the quest to survey its coasts accurately, and the placing of control over colonized fringes in the hands of ill-suited soldiers of fortune.

Silva: or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in his Majesty’s Dominions

$1500

The Book Merchant Jenkins

One of the most influential works on forestry ever published. The first Hunter edition with illustrations by John Miller.

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The Birds of Australia

$750000

Douglas Stewart Fine Books

London : printed by Richard and John Taylor for the author, 1848. The first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia, with hand-coloured illustrations and descriptions of 681 species, 328 of which were new to Western science and which Gould was the first to describe. The finest of all Australian colour plate books, and Gould’s ‘greatest achievement’ (Wantrup). Provenance: Sir Edward Charles Stirling (1848-1919), Director of the South Australian Museum 1895 - 1913

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City of Brisbane, Queensland.

$4750

Antique Print Map Room

Very rare, large c.19th hand coloured panorama of Brisbane depicting the wharves at Petrie’s Bight, from a vantage point near All Hallows School, by Albert Henry Fullwood (1863-1930).

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