The last thing any of us needs is yet another invitation to spend money, so although our latest catalogue – much larger than usual – contains many rare, unusual and interesting books, manuscripts, photographs and some maps, we’ll skip the customary self-promotion and let the items sell themselves.

We’ll take this opportunity to thank you for your ongoing interest in what we do: not all old is bad, not all new is good. We wish you all the best as another year passes.

Mick, Sue, Tom, Robert, Harry and David

Our current catalogue contains some superlative material, not least a matching pair of contemporary hand-coloured portrait photographs of the ill-fated explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills. A related rarity is Kirby’s Narrative of a Voyage from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria (1862), an account of the loss of the Firefly, wrecked while carrying stores for one of the expedition search parties. Other strengths include literature and private press material, including the boxed set of Sir John Tenniel's Illustrations to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, printed in 1988 for the first and only time from the original boxwood blocks engraved by the famous Dalziel Brothers, and limited to a mere 250 sets.

Click here to view the catalogue

Please click on any item in the catalogue for more information, or to place an order on our website

We thought the cracking copies of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s first two books, Mollie’s Bunyip (1904) and Mollie’s Staircase (1906), would be the children’s book highlights of our current catalogue. Then we purchased Benjamin Forster’s anonymously-issued Botanical Illustrations of the Twenty-Four Classes in the Linnaean System of Vegetables (1813): despite its prosaic title, this miniature book with 48 hand-coloured wood engravings would crown any international collection.

Fully one-third of this 200-item catalogue contains autograph material of one kind or another: marks of provenance, authors’ signatures or inscriptions, signed documents, photographs or letters. Signatories range from prime ministers to presidents, musicians to Nobel laureates, self-published authors to world-famous cricketers. However, the stellar item is a small group of letters from the archive of Professor T.G.H. Strehlow. They are primarily from Pastor F.W. Albrecht, who replaced Strehlow’s father as superintendent of the Finke River Mission at Hermannsburg in Central Australia in 1927. These letters, written in 1957-58, are of strong interest in themselves, but greater significance must be attached to the accompanying letters in Western Aranda (Arrernte) from five elders. We have obtained full translations, and our catalogue record is worth reading, whatever your collecting interests may be.

Off you go!