Online Catalogue #55
Our copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland may be just one of the 12,000 printed in the two years after it first appeared in 1866, but the exquisite double Cosway binding it received some forty years later makes it unique – and uniquely desirable. In the same league, we have an original South Australian land grant for Town Acre 558, issued to Osmond Gilles in December 1837, less than a year after the colony was established. At the time, he was also the Treasurer and one of the largest land speculators in the province!
In our latest offering, you will find complete runs of some rare Australian ‘little magazines’: Manuscripts (13 issues, 1931-35); Phoenix (nine issues, 1935-50); and Ern Malley’s Journal (six issues, 1952-55). A sampling of other titles includes Lindt’s Picturesque New Guinea (1887); Lambert’s A Trip to Cashmere and Ladak (1877); Menpes’ The Grey River (1889, one of only 230 copies with 12 original signed etchings, a gift from co-author Rosa Praed to Katie Langloh Parker); and Whitworth’s An Account of Russia as it was in the Year 1710 (Strawberry Hill Press, 1758).
Indigenous Australian history includes a copy of The London Chronicle for 6 April 1789, containing one of the earliest accounts of the indigenous inhabitants of the Sydney region; Spencer and Gillen’s The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899, signed by both authors); and two nineteenth-century portrait photographs.
Of course, there’s much more!
