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.

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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!

Our first catalogue for 2022 contains some very appealing rarities: an American Civil War muster roll; eight issues of Verve (containing numerous original lithographs by the likes of Bonnard, Braque, Chagall, Derain, Giacometti, Klee, Léger, Matisse, Miro, and Roualt); Stoddart’s presentation copy of the Australian Cricket Annual 1896-7; the first edition of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (with the dustwrapper); a 1930 autograph letter signed by Aldous Huxley (with very interesting literary content); rare examples of Indigenous Australian portraiture; a fine copy of the golden jubilee edition of Winnie-the-Pooh (one of only 300 copies signed by Christopher Robin himself); and an album of 87 large-format aerial photographs of New Guinea, circa 1943.

Don’t worry, there are also some standard works: Oxley’s Journals (1820); Our Pastoral Industry (1910); Pastoral Homes of Australia, New Series, Volume 1 (1929); Wild Rivers (1983) by Peter Dombrovskis and Bob Brown (signed by both of them) … we won’t go on ...