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.
Sucesos de las islas Filipinas dirigidos a Don Christoval Gomez de Sandoval y Rojas Duque de Cea.
$275000
En Mexico : En casa de Geronymo Balli. Año 1609. The exceedingly rare first edition of a cornerstone work in the literature of European exploration and colonisation in the Pacific. Sucesos has always been – from as far back as the early eighteenth century – a notoriously difficult book to obtain. Fewer than 25 extant copies are recorded.
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[Kelmscott Press]. MORRIS, William: The Story of the Glittering Plain
$16500
London, Printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, 1894 (second Kelmscott edition)/ 1891.
One of only 250 copies on paper (a further seven copies were printed on vellum). This is the second edition, and the first to contain the illustrations by Walter Crane.
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WILSON, Hardy. Old Colonial Architecture in New South Wales and Tasmania.
$1500
Published by the Author: Sydney, 1924. #208 of 1000 copies, signed by Hardy Wilson. Large folio. [vi], 10, IV, 50 tipped-in collotype plates, with titled tissue guards. Original quarter parchment and batik boards, gilt titles and bat device on the upper (without the dustwrapper, as usual). The spine is rubbed along the joints, which are just starting to split a little at the head and tail, the spine itself a little discoloured and with some slight damp-marking; the edges of the boards slightly rubbed. The volume is now protected by a new mylar wrapper. Internally in very nice clean condition.
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RAYMENT, Tarlton. A cluster of bees: sixty essays on the life-histories of Australian bees.
$1800
Octavo, coloured frontispiece and numerous illustrations. Contemporary full morocco with the bookplate of Harold Alston, inner dentelles and gilt rule, all edges gilt. "Savage Club Melbourne To my esteemed friend Harold Alston with good wishes Tarlton Rayment May 15, 1936".
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Peg Maltby: "Playing in the Snow" (original watercolour)
$2450
Vibrant watercolour by British Australian illustrator, Peg Maltby (1899 - 1984). Peg Maltby, née Agnes Newberry Orchard, worked in England as an illustrator of chocolate-box lids before emigrating to Melbourne where she became a member of the Victorian Artists' Society holding successful exhibitions of her watercolours in the 1930s and 1940s. Maltby rose to fame with the publication of 'Peg's Fairy Book', published by Muffetts in 1944 and selling over 180,000 copies in five editions. Note the rare inclusion of a native koala in the composition.
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