The 53rd Australian Antiquarian Book Fair
The Melbourne Rare Book Fair 2024 will be held Thursday 25 July to Saturday 27 July 2024
presented by ANZAAB with the support of the University of Melbourne.
About the Fair, History of the Fair
Featured Highlights
Dream / Life [Trent Parke]
$1500
First Printing [Hot Chilli Press, Sydney, 1999]; oblong quarto; 144 pages; black cloth, titling in black on spine, top edge sunned, 1cm spot stain on half-title, else fine; in excellent dustjacket, a bit rubbed, curling slightly at edges.
An excellent & scarce copy of brilliant photographer Trent Parke’s first book [photographs of the Sydney streets].
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[FIRST FLEET]. A letter sent by Midshipman Newton Fowell, on board HMS Sirius at sea, off Rio de Janeiro, 6 August 1787
$150000
Possibly the only First Fleet letter still remaining in private hands. An extraordinary foundation item for British settlement in Australia.
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[27711] Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et insulae Van-Dieman, exhibens characteres plantarum quas annis 1802-1805 ... edition secunda. ...
$4500
Brown, Robertus. Normibergae: Leonardi Schrag, 1827 second edition. Octavo, Contemporary half calf and marbled boards, all edges coloured, a few light spots, very scarce. The Prodromus is considered a masterpiece of botanical literature and "has a two-fold importance in the history of systematic botany. Its primary purpose was to record succinctly the plants of Australia collected by Robert Brown himself in 1802 and 1805 when naturalist on Flinders' voyage together with plants collected earlier by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on Cook's first voyage (1768-71.)
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WILSON, Samuel, Salmon at the Antipodes Being an Account of the Successful Introduction of Salmon and Trout into Australian Waters.
$1750
London, Edward Stanford, 1879.
Octavo, mounted photographic frontispiece 'Trout Pond at Ercildoune', folding map, index, very good in bright original decorated terracotta cloth, lettered in gilt, vignette of a salmon in silver on front board, lemon china clay endpapers, small lozenge binder's ticket on rear pastedown.
'Third Edition', preceded by a paper in the Zoological and Acclimatization Society of Victoria's 1878 annual report and reprinted by Sands & McDougall, as THE CALIFORNIAN SALMON, in the same year.
Author’s presentation copy.