Highlights

Rare c.19th detailed hand coloured engraved panorama of Hobart published in 1879. From the original edition of the Australasian Sketcher.

Rare and important, early c.19th hand coloured engraved chart by Lieutenant James Grant who was given command of the Lady Nelson with the instructions to sail her to Sydney and hand her over to Matthew Flinders.

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI (Mogliano Veneto 1720-Roma 1778) Italian school "VEDUTA DEL ROMANO CAMPIDOGLIO CON SCALINATA CHE VA ALLA CHIESA D'ARACELI" [THE CAPITOL AND THE STEPS OF S. MARIA IN ARACOELI] 1757 Etching DESCRIPTION: Original etching from the "Vedute di Roma". "Veduta del romano Campidoglio con Scalinata che va alla che va alla Chiesa d'Araceli". In this etching Piranesi captures with great power and theatricality one of the emblematic places of Rome: the Capitol, with its famous staircase. NOTE: Unidentified watermark. Hind 38, ii-iii/v.

London, Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1863 [first edition in book form]. Mill's definitive statement on moral philosophy. The text was first published as a series of three articles in 'Fraser's Magazine' in 1861; this first edition in book form is rare.

Japan : Nara period [764 – 770 CE]. A rare example of the earliest printed text to have survived in Eastern or Western cultures that can be verifiably dated, predating the movable type of Gutenberg by some seven centuries. A great treasure and rarity in the history of the printed word.

An intriguing collection of book lists, invoices, and receipts from the Temple Book Club, which operated between 1812 and 1819, a period during which first editions of works such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park were acquired at discounted rates and circulated among its members, a select group of barristers from one of London’s Inns of Court.

“CARTE DE LA NOUVELLE-HOLLANDE” 1824 Cartographer: LOUIS CLAUDE DE SAULCES DE FREYCINET (Montélimar 1779- Loriol-sur-Drôme 1841) Technique: COPPER ENGRAVING Rare updated version of Freycinet’s seminal map of Australia which was first issued in 1807 in a larger format in the accounts of the French expedition under the command of Nicholas Baudin. Freycinet was the cartographer for the expedition...

First edition, first printing, of Genet’s first publication. Written while in prison for book theft and privately printed in 1942 with manuscript corrections by the author. A hallucinatory homoerotic homage to another prisoner, Maurice Pilorge, a beautiful young man guillotined for murder in 1939.

The rare fourth volume of Pennant’s Outlines of the globe containing the large map of Australia, titled: Map For Mr. Pennants Outline of the Globe. Beautifully bound in striking contemporary hand painted tree calf

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.

One of the most substantial archives of Foelsche’s work to have survived, this unique album contains a body of images of immense intrinsic importance and value, collectively forming a photographic record of the Larrakia, Woolna (Djerimanga), and Iwaidja communities at the close of the nineteenth century. Without question, Foelsche's portraits of Indigenous subjects taken in the Top End between the 1870s and 1890s are among the most visually compelling taken by any nineteenth-century photographer working in Australia in the colonial era.

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.