Highlights
Each year our exhibitors bring extraordinarily rare, beautiful and unusual items for sale.
Here is a selection of the items offered in 2025 by our exhibitors. These may still be available for purchase. If interested, contact the respective exhibitor directlyCloser to the 2026 Fair, new highlights of what will be on offer in 2026 will be posted. Bookmark this page and visit again to see the 2026 highlights.
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.
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![The Waves [1931]; To The Lighthouse [1927]](https://rarebookfair.com/assets/catalogues/orchardbookshopadl@gmail.com/Waves-Lighthouse.jpg)
The Waves [1931]; To The Lighthouse [1927]
Two uniformly bound copies of key works by Virginia Woolf. Our copy of The Waves is the 1931 First Edition and To The Lighthouse is the Secend Impression, published in June 1927 [the month following the first printing].
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Studies of a Bullock and a Hoof by William Strutt (1825 - 1915)
$3500
Pencil on wash with measurements 29 x 22.7 cm. Provenance: Private Collection, North Wales, part of a collection of works by William Strutt and Alfred William Strutt sold at Sotheby's, Chester, March 1991: John Ness Barkes & Edward Barkes
Probably a study for Black Thursday: A search for life through Cape Otway Forest on the memorable Feb 6th 1851. Plate 14, page 29, Victoria the Golden, Scenes, Sketches and Jottings from Nature by William Strutt, Melbourne, Victoria 1850-1862
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Dobbson's first book restricted to 200 copies and published when she was only 17.
$500
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.
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![中華書局印刷樣本. [Chung Hwa Book Company Printing Samples Book].](https://rarebookfair.com/assets/catalogues/books@asiabookroom.com/china_highres-5.jpg)
中華書局印刷樣本. [Chung Hwa Book Company Printing Samples Book].
$1500
Delightful sample catalogue from Chung Hwa Book Co. in Shanghai with 38 unpaginated leaves including introduction, awards, and samples demonstrating the types of printing and printed illustrations carried out by this printing company. Chinese card binding with silk ties, 21 x 28.4cm. Presented in blue cloth-covered case with toggles, 29.8 x 21.4cm. The first 2 leaves include the company's logo and a foreword introducing the company and its expansion in just a few short years, up until Minguo 5. Following this there are 7 pages of photographic illustrations of awards received by the company.
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![Fraz Kafka: Autograph letter signed ("K"). [Prague, December 1921].](https://rarebookfair.com/assets/catalogues/mpeche@inlibris.com/img-bn67667.jpg)
Fraz Kafka: Autograph letter signed ("K"). [Prague, December 1921].
$134000
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.
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Inheritors: a Novel by Brian Penton.
$850
Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1936. Demy octavo, small bookseller's label on front pastedown, very good in original bright burgundy cloth lettered in gilt on spine with Norman Lindsay dustwrapper, few blemishes but in uncommonly good condition. First edition. Second volume of Penton's unfinished trilogy. Published as Giant's Stride in the UK. Very scarce with the fabulous Lindsay dustwrapper.
PSEUDO-ARISTOTLE. Aristotle’s Master-Piece.
$36600
Rare early edition of “the first sex manual written in English” (Norman), for centuries the most popular compendium on conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. This copy has contemporary annotations by a husband and wife in the midst of conceiving and giving birth to their second child. Winifred and Francis Witham of South Normanton both inscribed the book in 1699, two years after their marriage.
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J.R.R. Tolkien
Various items of interest for the Tolkien fan, including an excellent set of The Lord Of The Rings [Second Edition, 1966]; all three De Luxe Editions of Tolkien works [LotR, The Hobbit, Poems & Stories]; and even a scale model of Gandalf from the Weta studio [New Zealand set creators for the epic movie franchise]!
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee | Dee Brown
$3900
An American bestseller in hard cover for over a year post publication, selling many millions of copies and was translated into seventeen languages, Brown became a celebrated author of both fiction and non-fiction until he died in 2002.
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Silva: or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in his Majesty’s Dominions
$1500
One of the most influential works on forestry ever published. The first Hunter edition with illustrations by John Miller.
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A treatise on the culture of the vine
$35000
Australia [i.e. Sydney] : R. Howe, Government Printer, 1825. The first edition of the first Australian book on wine. In the introduction Busby explains that Australia had a viable future as a major wine producing country, a statement that justifies the epithet for him of ‘prophet of Australian viticulture’.
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Barret (Robert) THE THEORIKE AND PRACTIKE OF MODERNE WARRES.
$15000
Discoursed in Dialogue wise. Printed for William Ponsonby, London, 1598. *'A compilation from foreign writers. It is said that Shakespeare in the passage "The gallant militarist that had the whole theoric of war in the knot of his scarf, and the practice in the chaps of his dagger" (All's Well That Ends Well, act iv, scene iii), was alluding to this book' [Cockle, page 57]. The table of 'forrain words' at the end is effectively the first English glossary of military terminology preceding the anonymously published Military Dictionary of 1702.
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Pedro Fernández de Quirós: Manuscript memorial to Philip III of Spain.
$800000
A radical abolitionist in the age of Shakespeare: original Quiròs manuscript memorial arguing against the Black slave trade. [Madrid, possibly before September 1611]. An exceptional document in the history of Portuguese colonization of South America, and one of the greatest rarities in the field of voyages and exploration: an original manuscript petition, not recorded in any other copy, written to the King of Spain by the Portuguese-Spanish seafarer and discoverer Pedro Fernández de Quirós (Queirós), proposing to settle the "Austral lands" for the Spanish crown.
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"THREE ABORIGINAL CHILDREN", B. E. MINNS.
$330
BENJAMIN EDWIN MINNS
(Dungog, 17 November 1863 – Taronga Zoo, 21 February 1937)
"THREE ABORIGINAL CHILDREN"
1926
ETCHING & AQUATINT
DESCRIPTION: Original etching by B.E. Minns depicting 3 indigenous Australian children sitting on their knees in the outdoor with an arrow and a boomerang at right.
Signed by the artist in pencil lower right and on the plate.
NOTE:Etching and aquatint on copperplate printed on cream laid paper
Signed by the artist in pencil lower right and on the plate.
SIZE: 124mm(H) x 173mm(L) [plate]
202mm(H) x 254mm(L) [sheet]
CONDITION:
In perfect condition.
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The philosophy of Andy Warhol. (From A to B and back again). (Signed copy with drawing of a Campbell’s Soup can)
$7500
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.
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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.
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Dickens (Charles) A TALE OF TWO CITIES.
$7500
With illustrations by H. K. Browne. Chapman & Hall, London, 1859. First edition in book form. Smith, Part I, 13, with all the internal flaws called for, but without the advertisement catalogue found 'in some copies'. *A Tale of Two Cities originally appeared in the weekly journal All the Year Round, from April 30 to November 26, 1859. It was also published in eight monthly parts (the last part being a double number), from June to December 1859. This was the final work illustrated by Browne for Dickens.
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Dante Alighieri: La Commedia. Comm. Jacopo della Lana.
$445000
"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
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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."
