Highlights

Each year our exhibitors bring rare, beautiful and unusual items for sale.

Here are just a few of the exhibitors' highlights that were at the Fair in 2023!

There are a number of pages of highlights. To browse all the highlights - choose a page from the list below.

You can also check the highlights listed under your favourite booksellers in the exhibitor directory.

Although the 2023 Fair has now closed, some of these items may still be available from our Exhibitors if you wish to contact them.

[BACON, Francis.] Apophthegms New and Old, collected by the Right Honourable, Francis Lo. Vervlam, Viscount St. Alban.
$2500
Printed for Hanna Barret and Richard Whittaker, and are to be sold at the Kings Head in Pauls Church-yard: London, 1625. 12mo. [ii] (title, verso blank), 308pp (last blank). The title within a narrow double-ruled border, text within a wider double-ruled border, leaving a blank marginal column (for notes?). Contemporary full calf, neatly rebacked with the unlettered spine laid down. Hinges strengthened with Japanese tissue. Lacks a preliminary blank leaf? Title-page is slightly off-centre and a little rubbed along its head edge. The text somewhat offset on a few late pages.
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[SIGNED] COCTEAU, Jean; PICASSO, Pablo; WILDMAN, Carl (Trans.) Orpheé; A Tragedy in one Act and an Interval
$2500
London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Pablo Picasso. First English Language Edition. Original cloth. Hardcover : pp. [vi] xi, 43 [1] : frontis by Picasso : photo of Cocteau as Heurtebise : printed on Basingwerk paper : SIGNED by both Cocteau and Picasso at colophon (p.iv), Cocteau has added his signature star : fore-edge untrimmed : black cloth boards lettered in gilt on top board : custom clamshell box in black cloth littered in gilt. Cloth is chipped to all edges and split 9cm from crown of top joint; some light foxing. Item #3927 No. 23 of 100.
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Austen, Jane [R.W.Chapman (coll.)], The Novels of Jane Austen. Five Volumes [with] Jane Austen's Letters to her sister Cassandra and others [2 Vols.]
$7500
The Clarendon Press, 1923. Lrg Ed. Limited 1000 copies, 950 of which were for sale. 1923/1932. 7 vols. 8vo. contemporary full green morocco gilt, raised bands, uncut, marbled endpapers; pp. The Novels (1923) Vol. I Sense and Sensibility, xii, [ii], 427pp; Vol. II Pride and Prejudice, xiii, [i], 415pp; Vol. III Mansfield Park, Lover's Vows, xii, [ii], 567pp; Vol. IV Emma, xi, [iii], 521pp ; Vol V Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, xiii, [i], 252pp, 1-310pp. The Letters (1932). Vol I.1796-1809. xlvi, 1-266, [34]; xxx, 267-510, [122]. Coloured frontispieces, illustrations and maps, throughout.
Walton, The Rev. W. H. Murray. Scrambles in Japan and Formosa.
$1500
London: Edward Arnold, 1934. First Edition. 8vo. original cloth gilt in dustwrapper; pp. 304, with 26 plates & 2 folding maps. A superb copy in an excellent example of the scarce dustwrapper, about fine. Although there were few major peaks in the Japanese Alps not been scaled before Western alpine pioneers, climbing as a leisure activity was a novel idea to the Japanese. In this context, the mountaineering achievements of Walter Weston and those that followed, H. E. Daunt and Murray Walton, are an enduring legacy of pre-war Anglo-Japanese relations.
Land Grant document, 3 February 1823 : in favor of THOMAS GEORGE GREGSON, 300 acres in Van Diemen’s Land, in the District of Bath... Registered in Sydney, 30 June 1823. Signed by SIR THOMAS BRISBANE.
$1000
Manuscript on vellum, with seal. 320x460mm, folded. In very good clean condition. *** For Gregson, a volatile political figure in VDL, one of the 'Patriotic Six' and (very briefly) Tasmania's second Premier, see ADB 1. The land was near Jericho, on the Jordan River, and the grant included the services of three transported convicts. Gregson was alleged to have bribed the surveyor G.W. Evans, with a piano, to swear that there was insufficient land adjacent to his first grant for an additional location, thus allowing him to take later grants in a more favourable location (this being one of them?)