• Novelists and poets, including Marcel Proust, Lev Tolstoy, Robert Graves, H.G. Wells, Maksim Gorki, Saul Bellow, and Christina Rossetti;
• Political thinkers, including Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and William Wilberforce;
• Composers and musicians, including Igor Stravinsky, Noël Coward, Olivier Messiaen, Gustav Mahler, and Jules Massenet;
• World leaders, including American presidents, British prime ministers, and French and British kings and queens.

Click here to view catalogue and bid

Final bidding starts Saturday 14 December at 1:30pm (Australian Central Daylight Time)

Important information

How to bid:

• leave bids online now, in advance of the sale;
• bid live online on auction day;
• leave absentee bids (download the absentee bidding form here);
• bid live by telephone (by prior arrangement, on lots with a lower estimate of $900 or more).

All items are available for viewing at our North Terrace premises. However, for the majority of you who are not Adelaideans and for whom personal inspection is not an option, all items are accurately described and photographed, and are covered by our conditional guarantee. Additional images can be provided on request.

• Buyer's premium: 20%
• Online bidding fee: 3% (waived for absentee and telephone bids)
• Currency: Australian Dollars
• Competitive domestic and international shipping rates
• All items covered by our limited guarantee, as stipulated in the Conditions of Sale

Our forthcoming auction contains numerous rare and unusual items in three main areas – Australian voyages and exploration, Egyptology, and the history of medicine – with smaller sections devoted to works by T.E. Lawrence, literature, and antiquarian books. Bids may be left any time from now until the final bidding commences with Lot 1 at 1:30pm ACDT on Saturday 12 October.

You will find information on how to bid below, but please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any queries relating to any aspect of the catalogue or the bidding procedure.

Click here to view catalogue and bid

Final bidding starts Saturday 12 October at 1:30pm ACDT

Important information

You can leave bids online now, bid live online on auction day, or leave absentee bids (you can download the absentee bidding form here).

You can click on each lot in the catalogue to see a full description and additional images.

All items are available for viewing at our North Terrace premises. However, for the majority of you who are not Adelaideans and for whom personal inspection is not an option, all items are accurately described and photographed, and are covered by our conditional guarantee.

Yet more temptation! There are 150 items to browse this time, so we’ll make this introduction mercifully brief.

A copy of the first book published in German in South Australia (Fritzsche’s Beleuchtung der in dem gedruckten Synodalausschreiben des Pastors Herrn August Kavel, 1847) may not be to everyone’s taste, but then again, we have only the one copy for sale (well, actually ...).

However, we do have fourteen J.M. Coetzee titles, all signed, including unique Booker Prize-winner presentation copies; some two dozen items of Indigenous Australian interest (including two very rare Captain Sweet photographs, among our wide selection of other rare photographica) … enough said!

To coincide with the Melbourne Rare Book Fair we are pleased to announce the latest in our series of Picture Book catalogues. It contains many treasures:

• • accounts of voyages by Magra, Bligh, MacGillivray and Flinders (the rare large-paper issue, a gift from the explorer's only child, with the elephant folio atlas);
• • accounts of inland expeditions by Hume, Blaxland, Carron, Jardine, Leichhardt and Cross (the first work relating to the exploration of Western Australia);the extremely rare second impression of Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937, with the dustwrapper), the first edition of J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1911, with the dustwrapper), and P.G. Wodehouse's Mike (1919, also with the dustwrapper!);
• • autograph material from Hector Berlioz, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Sir Robert Torrens and Sir Douglas Mawson;
• • numerous important photographs, including an Antarctic masthead panorama by Frank Hurley, an early experimental image from a negative produced by exposure to radioactivity, and portraits (many with signatures) of the founders of Darwin;
• • and an apparently unrecorded large-scale map of the failed Ottoman attempt to invade Egypt on 3 February 1915, the first action in the First World War to include the AIF, prepared by the 3rd Field Company, Australian Engineers, the only Australian unit present.

To view these items (and much besides) visit us at Stand 24 at the Melbourne Rare Book Fair, 12–14 July.