Highlights
Each year our exhibitors bring extraordinarily rare, beautiful and unusual items for sale.
Leading up to the fair, you will find here, highlights, selected by our exhibitors, of the wide range of items that will be on exhibition and for sale at this year's fair.
Bookmark this page and visit again as our exhibitors will be adding highlights over the next two months
If something is of interest, please contact the exhibitor directly. They will welcome your enquiry.
The Satanic Verses | Signed Copy | Salman Rushdie
$8000
This immaculate first edition, signed and dedicated by the author, will further become one of the prize editions in English literature. Rushdie is understandably unlikely to ever commit to any public signings again.
View More
An Austen family copy of the first edition in beautiful Regency binding. AUSTEN (Jane). Emma.
$100000
First edition. Three volumes. 12mo. Contemporary tree calf, single-rule gilt border, flat spines elaborately panelled in gilt. London, John Murray. 1816.
From the library of Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen (1829-1893), Jane Austen’s grand-nephew. It is uncommon to find Jane Austen titles in contemporary bindings and even more so with such intimate provenance.
Clark: Foreign Field Sports, Fisheries, Sporting Anecdotes, &c. &c. ... With a Supplement of New South Wales
$7500
London, Published and sold by Edward Orme, 1814 and 1813.
The 'Supplement of New South Wales' ('Field Sports &c. &c. of the Native Inhabitants of New South Wales, with Ten Plates, by the Author, dedicated, by permission, to Rear Admiral Bligh ...') is described by Jonathan Wantrup as 'the very first book on the Australian Aborigines, a fact not often acknowledged'.
View More
The Karla Trilogy | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People | John Le Carre
$1800
All First editions and First UK impressions. Together, the trilogy is in a near-fine state overall. Arguably the greatest works of fiction dealing with the Cold War ever written, unified by the ubiquitous Smiley and his Russian equivalent Karla.
View More
Landfall, Environs of Sydney 1971 by Shay Docking (1928 - 1998)
$4200
The work consists of pencil drawings on four sheets of paper
with measurements of 20.5 x 101.5 cm. The works are signed, titled "Landfall" and dated 1971. Shay Docking's work is represented in the National Gallery, Canberra, all State galleries, many Regional galleries and University collections throughout Australia and New Zealand.
View More
Thunderball | Ian Fleming
$2100
First Edition, First Impression of the ninth book in the James Bond series, or the first in the Blofeld trilogy, is excellent for the ardent Bond followers in such a good state.
View More
A Winter Ship
$5750
Plath’s first independently published poem - one of only 60 copies. Depicting a desolate scene across an unnamed harbor, this beautifully produced booklet is a true literary treasure.
View More
Ah! Nana
$1200
Complete set of the French women’s comic magazine. Ah!Nana ran for nine issues, each with its own theme, coming to a short end following the magazine being banned to minors after the publication of the eighth issue devoted to homosexuality. This led the editorial team to go all in on the ninth and final issue, devoting it to incest, leading to the French censorship Commission banning the publication, labelling it pornographic.
View More
![雙六式國史早わかり. [Sugoroku - Quick View of Japan's History].](https://rarebookfair.com/assets/catalogues/books@asiabookroom.com/216826_01.jpg)
雙六式國史早わかり. [Sugoroku - Quick View of Japan's History].
$650
Large colour folding sugoroku game, 93 x 125cm.
This unique and visually rich sugoroku-style educational chart was published in 1927 in Shizuoka by Yamamura Azusa. Intending to present Japanese history through the lens of the imperial lineage, Yamamura sought to make the subject accessible and engaging for children by structuring it as a game. Using the familiar sugoroku board format, he transforms historical chronology into a path of progress, starting with the mythological creation of Japan by the sun goddess Amaterasu at the centre of the chart.
View More
![Post Office [1st UK]](https://rarebookfair.com/assets/catalogues/orchardbookshopadl@gmail.com/Bukowski-w.jpg)
Post Office [1st UK]
$1000
Bukowski's alter-ego Henry Chinaski at his finest [read most disgusting, most hilarious, most obscene, etc]. Post Office was Bukowski's first novel and his best. "It began as a mistake. It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody..."
View More
Salvador Dali, Hidden Faces
$150
1st thus, revised translation, 1973. London: Peter Owen.
8vo. Original black boards gilt in dustjacket; pp. i-xiv, 15-320 (last blank), with illustrations by the author. A near fine copy.
The famous surrealist artist’s only novel, written in 1944, describing the intrigues of a group of eccentric aristocrats whose extravagant lifestyle symbolises the decadence of the 1930s
CHIVERS BINDING - TENNYSON, Alfred. Poetical Works.
$14100
A “vellucent” style binding, with delicately rendered Arthurian figures after Dorothy Carlton Smyth (1880-1933), the most prolific of Chivers’s female designers. Smyth was particularly involved with the Glasgow School of Art, who appointed her as their first female director. Her stained glass Tristan and Iseult, the subject of one of Tennyson’s Arthurian poems, garnered wide acclaim at the 1901 International Exhibition.
View More
THE FIRST DEPICTIONS OF THE CONSTELLATIONS IN A PRINTED BOOK. HYGINUS (Gaius Julius). Poetica astronomica.
$51400
First illustrated edition. Title on a2 printed in red, 47 half-page woodcuts of the constellation and planet figures, partially coloured by an early hand.
4to. (57 leaves (lacks first blank), 31 lines, gothic type, a few words in greek. Late 19th century calf-backed boards, spine with red and green labels lettered in gilt. Venice, 1482.
Expedition Antarctique Belge. Au Pays des Manchots: Recit du Voyage de la Belgica
$1800
Account of the captain of the RV Belgica, Georges Lecointe, the second in command of the first Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897-1899. Considered the first expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. This copy bound in full vellum with a manuscript letter from Lecointe bound in.
View More
Typescript of Jack London's South Sea story, "Mauki"
$58000
“Mauki” holds significant literary and historical importance for the South Pacific, particularly in its depiction of colonial labour practices and indigenous resistance during a period of intense imperial activity.
Written in 1907 during London's cruise of the South Pacific in the Snark, "Mauki" was first published by Hampton's Magazine in December 1908 and was collected in South Sea Stories in 1911. This is the Hampton's setting copy and is one of only a handful of Jack London manuscripts to come onto the market in the past 50 years.
View More
CHURCHILL (Winston S.) The Second World War: The Gathering Storm; The Finest Hour; The Grand Alliance; The Hinge of Fate; Closing the Ring; Triumph and Tragedy.
$30750
First editions, first printings. Six volumes. Numerous maps and diagrams, some folding and others full-page, throughout each volume. 8vo. Original black cloth, spines lettered in gilt, top edges in red, supplied dust jackets. London, Cassell & Co. Ltd. 1948-1954.
Inscribed to Grace Hamblin, "the longest-serving member of Churchill’s secretarial staff."
The Color Star
$500
Itten's Color Star with eight templates that can overlay and display a variety of what he termed "color chords"
View More
Rime of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Illustrated by Erroll Le Cain.
$3750
LE CAIN, Erroll (Illustrator) THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER. ONE OF 100 COPIES. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Illustrations by Erroll Le Cain. Calligraphy by David Howells. Paper by Philip H.Rowson. Lond. The Arcadia Press. 1972. Folio. Hand-bound by Zaehnsdorf in quarter vellum with seaweed paper sides. 55pp. t.e.g. Calligraphic text on seaweed paper pages. Ten striking tipped-in colour plates by Erroll Le Cain. No.50 of 110 numbered copies signed by the illustrator, the calligrapher and the paper-maker. Fine in the slip-case. Particularly scarce.
Rushcutter’s Bay, Looking South 1896 by Phillip Lee (1865 - 1909)
$4500
Phillip Lee 1865 - 1909 painted “romantic views of Australian scenery, notably coast scenes on the Illawarra Plains, the summit of the Bulli Pass, the Home of the Black-fish, Hawkesbury River, Fairy Bower, Manly, and the Blue Mountains." Refer SMH 27, March 1896.
His painting 'Native Sports 1880' was acquired by the NGA in 1969. 'The Pass, Bulli 1898' and 'Cascades at Fitzroy Falls, Moss Vale 1898' were sold by the Bridget McDonnell Gallery in 2006.
View More
Astounding Science Fiction July 1940
$150
In this issue: the first printing of Robert Heinlein's novelette, "Coventry" as well as L. Ron Hubbard's "The Idealist" (published under the psuedonym, Kurt von Rachen). Part of number of titles on early science fiction.
View More
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
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.
La Nuova Olanda e la Nuova Guinea delineato sulle ultime osservazioni
$9250
Very rare and important c.18th map of Australia based on Cook’s first voyage observations and one of only a handful of maps to be solely devoted to the Australia continent.
View More
![Neuromancer [Signed Ltd Ed]](https://rarebookfair.com/assets/catalogues/orchardbookshopadl@gmail.com/Neuromancer-Signed.jpg)
Neuromancer [Signed Ltd Ed]
$1250
Published to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of this SF classic, this is one of only 200 copies. Signed by William Gibson, the man who coined the term "cyberspace"... welcome to the matrix! As-new copy.
View More
