Highlights

Each year our exhibitors bring rare, beautiful and unusual items for sale.

Here are a sample of the wide range of printed materials that were available at the 2024 Fair. If you are interested in these, please contact the exhibitor, they may still be available

2025 Highlights will be posted in June 2025


“HOBSON BAY AND THE RIVER YARRA LEADING TO MELBOURNE”
$7800
Cartographer: Captain G.H. RICHARDS Publisher: BRITISH ADMIRALTY 1865 [1901] Engraving [engraved by J. & C. WALKER] Very interesting and detailed large plan of Melbourne and Hobson Bay. All pertinent nautical information as ports, docks, sea depths, sand bars, wrecks, as well as building, streets, parks etc are accurately named and tracked. As updated charts were offered for sale, the earlier outdated charts in the hands of mariners, pilots, ships owners and sailors were invariably discarded, subsequently making all British Admiralty issued hydrographic charts of the period rare
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Portrait of a queen or princess in oriental Egyptian style.
$8000
August Pollak (1838-1903) A wonderful painting of an "Oriental Woman”, in the guise of Cleopatra wearing the goddess Neckhbet (Vulture) head-dress with a suggestion of a cobra at the brow.  Fine gold earrings and a beautiful necklace adorn her, with the sensuous somewhat fragile beauty of the imagined Cleopatra. Pollack was an Austrian artist, many of his paintings are of still lives, sensuous women or whimsical studies of children with cats, he is known for his oriental subjects. His paintings have about them a Fusilian mystery. The painting could be a study for a larger work.
The Great Southern Continent
$856000
A spectacular wall map of astonishing beauty made at the beginning of the Dutch Golden Age. The present map draws on the cartography of Luis Teixeira (fl 1564-1613), whose name appears in the large banner title. He was a Portuguese cartographer from a famous mapmaking dynasty. He worked in Lisbon and the Portuguese colonies, but was also a friend of and collaborator with Dutch cartographers, contributing a map of Japan to Abraham Ortelius’s atlas. Ortelius and Cornelis Claesz published five of his maps between them, and all were specifically advertised as based on his work.
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