Melbourne Rare Book Fair

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

[HOOKER (Joseph Dalton), his copy] HYDROGRAPHIC OFFICE. Chart of the South Polar Sea.

$25000

Maggs Bros Ltd

First edition, first issue. Measuring 632 by 842mm. A little toned with old folds with ms. annotations in blue and red ink, small ink stain to upper margin, a couple of small, closed tears. London, Hydrographic Office, published according to the Act of Parliament, and sold by R.B. Bate [price] 2s.6d, June, 1839. An important copy of this rare map, owned by Joseph Dalton Hooker, assistant surgeon aboard HMS Erebus on James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expedition of 1839-43.

Ongeluckige voyagie van het schip Batavia uytgevaren onder’t beleydt van den E. Francois Pelsaert,

$55000

Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Amsterdam : Gillis Joosten Saeghman, [c.1663]. A rare early illustrated edition of Pelsaert’s account of the wreck of the Batavia. The infamous story of the wreck of the Batavia was first published in Amsterdam in 1647, and the first edition is of the utmost rarity. Five editions followed in the seventeenth century, including two pirated versions, and all of these are considered rare. The Saeghman edition is held in only two Australian collections (neither in Western Australia) and a handful of libraries internationally.

View More

COOK, James - SAMWELL, David. A Narrative of the Death of Captain James Cook.

$365800

Peter Harrington

First edition of this black tulip in the history of Cook. Samwell sailed with Cook as surgeon on the Discovery and his is the “fullest, most detailed and most objective” account of Cook’s death, scrupulously gathered from eyewitnesses (Holmes). We have traced five copies only at auction in the last 50 years, including the present copy.

View More

The Great Sermon Handicap by P.G. Wodehouse.

$1500

Kenneth Hince Old & Fine Books

London, Hodder and Stoughton, [1933]. Duodecimo, very good in original gilt-lettered and decorated crimson boards with pictorial dustwrapper (slightly chipped), marbled endpapers. First separate edition. McIlvaine, A49a. Charming small format edition with dustwrapper in uncommonly good condition of the quintessential Jeeves & Bertie story: '"Well, all I can say," he cried, "is that it's a bit thick! Preaching another man's sermon! Do you call that honest? Do you call that playing the game?"'

The Origin Of Species By Means of Natural Selection | Charles Darwin

$2950

Somerset House Books

According to the well-credentialled Forum Auctions in London:- “The printing of 1876 is the final text as Darwin left it. The issue was limited to 1,250 copies only. This number is as small as any, being equalled only by that of the first edition and is remarkably hard to come by (Freeman pp 80-81 of F401)" So, this copy is a very good example of the Sixth 'Eighteenth Thousand' Edition but note: the actual print number as quoted has recently been disputed elsewhere and possibly may have been as many as 2000 copies. Still, very scarce with about 150 years of age patina.

View More

Dante Alighieri: La Commedia. Comm. Jacopo della Lana.

$445000

INLIBRIS

"La prima edizione commentata della Divina Commedia" (Mambelli), published only five years after the editio princeps (Foligno 1472). An exceptionally large and crisp copy, completely unsophisticated in its first binding

View More

CHIVERS BINDING - TENNYSON, Alfred. Poetical Works.

$14100

Peter Harrington

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 philosophy of Andy Warhol. (From A to B and back again). (Signed copy with drawing of a Campbell’s Soup can)

$7500

Douglas Stewart Fine Books

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. First edition. Octavo, boards in dust jacket, pp 241; a fine copy; the half-title is signed and inscribed by Warhol, accompanied by an original pen drawing by the artist of a Campbell’s Tomato Soup can, his most iconic image. Andy Warhol’s seminal self-analysing memoir, filled with his reflections of youth and society which help give an insight into one of the most enigmatic and magnetic artistic figures of the twentieth century.

View More

Cruikshank (George) CRUIKSHANK'S WATER COLOURS.

$1200

Kay Craddock - Antiquarian Bookseller

A. & C. Black, London, 1903. De luxe edition, limited to 300 numbered copies signed by the publisher. Inman 227. *From the library of Australian pathologist and medical historian, Professor Harold Dallas Attwood, with his bookplate on verso of upper free endpaper; later from the library of David Levine, Sydney, whose book label is above Attwood’s. The main text consists of extracts from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist; William Harrison Ainsworth's The Miser's Daughter; and W. H. Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798; all with Cruikshank's accompanying illustrations.

View More

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

View More

台湾勤務日本人警察官手帳. [Japanese Police Officer's Journal].

$3250

Asia Bookroom

Pocket book with hand-written journal records in graphite, 117pp. 10.5 x 7cm. A very rare and highly unusual example of a notebook kept by a Japanese policeman (junsa) in colonial Taiwan in the early twentieth century. On the upper cover of the notebook debossed characters name the southern Taiwanese region of 蕃薯藔廳 (Fanshuliao District), home to Rukai and Paiwan indigenous people. The entries span the period from December 1903 to 25 May 1904. Most entries appear to be Morimoto's day-to-day notes taken during and after his interactions with the indigenous people in the area.

View More

Lucio Fontana

$150

Sainsburys Books

Scarce monograph on the Italian avant-garde, abstract artist.

View More

ABNEY, Hephzibah. Manuscript with hundreds of original watercolour illustrations of shells.

$26100

Peter Harrington

A conchological labour of love: an attractive album of “shells from nature” by the talented watercolourist Hephzibah Abney (née Need, 1758-1841) and a record of the conchylomania that swept Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This is the only recorded example of Abney’s shell illustrations and has re-entered the market almost 50 years after its last appearance.

Grecian and Chinese Architecture Hardy Wilson

$900

The Antique Bookshop & Curios

Grecian & Chinese Architecture By Hardy Wilson. 1937 No.93 of 100 copies. 50 tipped-in plates

THOMPSON, Theophilus. Chess Problems.

$73200

Peter Harrington

Scarce first edition of the author’s sole work, marking the starting point of chess book publishing in African American history. Born into slavery in Maryland, Thompson became a house-servant following his emancipation and learned the game in 1872 after meeting John Hanshew, later the editor of the Maryland Chess Review. Thompson published this collection of 101 prodigious problems the next year, aged 18.

ONE OF TEN KNOWN BOOKS FROM SIR WALTER RALEGH'S PRISON LIBRARY IN THE TOWER OF LONDON. [RALEIGH (Walter).] VIGNIER (Nicolas, the younger). Theatre de L‘Antechrist.

$72000

Maggs Bros Ltd

First edition. Small Folio. 692, [14 (index/errata)] pp. Diagonal closed tear from a paper flaw in EEe2. Contemporary limp vellum, sewn on four tawed leather slips, the covers tooled in the centre with the armorial crest of Sir Walter Ralegh. [Saumur] 1610.

Christina, the Maid of the South Seas; a Poem.

$4000

Archives Fine Books

MITFORD, Mary Russell . London: Printed by A. J. Valpy for F. C. and J. Rivington, 1811. First Edition. Mary Russell Mitford's (1787-1855) second published title.A metrical tale based on the first news of discovery of the last surviving mutineer of the H. M. S. Bounty and a generation of British-Tahitian children on Pitcairn Island in 1811. As a manuscript, the work was apparently read and corrected by James Burney who sailed with Captain James Cook and the proofs were corrected by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A scarce item.

Dobbson's first book restricted to 200 copies and published when she was only 17.

$500

Archives Fine Books

Rosemary Dobson. Poems. [Mittagong, NSW]: Frensham Press, 1937. First Edition. Paper boards with black and white lino cut designed by Rosemary Dobson with her monogrammed initials : red paper label lettered in black : black cloth spine. The Press was established by the Australian children's author Joan Phipson after she visited some private presses in England and consulted Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press. Leonard Woolf was later to praise Dobson's book as equal to any of the initial efforts by the Hogarth Press.

View More

"THE GREAT COLORPLATE BOOK OF THE NORTH PACIFIC" (Forbes). CHORIS (Louis). Voyage Pittoresque autour du monde ...

$250000

Maggs Bros Ltd

First edition. Rare coloured issue. 105 lithographed plates, folding map & 2 further maps. Folio. Contemporary diced calf with gilt border, rebacked, lightly worn, some toning and spotting to plates & pale dampstaining to final six, repaired tear one plate. Paris,1822. “One of the very valuable and fundamental works on Alaska, California, and the Hawaiian islands” (Lada-Mocarski).

さいころ独楽. 日本酒附録. [1930s Sake Advertising Campaign].

$450

Asia Bookroom

Sixteen delightful small porcelain spinning tops measuring 2.0 x 1.7cm in size each accompanied by ten handsome colour printed product labels heightened in gilt with soft purple cord ties (8.3 x 6cm). These sake promotional giveaways and accompanying die-cut cards in the shape of the Order of the Golden Kite are advertisements associated with Meiyo-gura, a sake brand sold in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. The advertisement describes a koma (spinning top), attached beneath the bottle top, which could also serve as a small entertainment item.

View More

The Karla Trilogy | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People | John Le Carre

$1800

Somerset House Books

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

Fraz Kafka: Autograph letter signed ("K"). [Prague, December 1921].

$134000

INLIBRIS

To his close friend, the physician Robert Klopstock, about mutual friends, including Irene Bugsch, who, to Kafka's great joy, had recently been accepted by the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

View More