New Year’s greetings, and welcome to our first retail catalogue for 2019. It is an interesting miscellany representative of just some of our many interests – in this case these include art, autographs, literature, photographs, travel and exploration. Recent acquisitions include rare Lawrence of Arabia ephemera, Somerset de Chair’s The First Crusade (Golden Cockerel Press, one of 100 copies), and Idriess’s The Cattle King (1936, a fine first edition with the dustwrapper).

Photographs include the first one taken of Robert O’Hara Burke’s burial tree, a framed pair of images of the Smith brothers’ Vickers Vimy in Adelaide in March 1920, a very unusual group portrait of Oswald Mosley and his first wife’s family, and fine portraits of Don Bradman and George Fife Angas.

Welcome to our latest catalogue and our revamped website. The ease with which you will be able to navigate your way around it belies (but more than justifies) the time and effort spent on the project.

However, if you remain cartographically challenged, read on. We can offer you a copy of the very rare atlas, Goyder’s Plan of the Southern Portion of the Province of South Australia (1877), and a presumably much rarer linen handkerchief map highlighting the Dardanelles in 1914. We have J.M. Black’s complete set of Brown’s Forest Flora of South Australia (1882-90), with 45 superb chromolithographs. There are eight photobooks by Bird, Everard, Green and Haskins; a vintage photograph of three-times Australian prime minister, Alfred Deakin and his wife; and a very large-format photograph taken at the farewell banquet in London in October 1900 to The Earl of Hopetoun, the first Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia.

There are rare and desirable cricket cartoon books by Branson, Glover and Mailey; fine first editions of Idriess’s The Desert Column (1932, with the dustwrapper) and Gold-Dust and Ashes (1933, one of only 200 of the signed deluxe version); Kaleski’s Australian Barkers and Biters (1914, in the original pictorial wrappers) … in short, the tempting eclectic mixture as before!

To coincide with the Melbourne Rare Book Fair we are pleased to announce the latest in our series of Picture Book catalogues. It contains a fine miscellany, from Antarctic photography to scarce modern literature, classic texts of voyages and exploration to unique manuscript material.

Since the catalogue went to the printers we have been busy! New in stock are:

A singular copy of A Child's Garden of Verses, signed and inscribed by Robert Louis Stevenson, together with a signed letter; The Native Tribes of Central Australia signed by both Spencer and Gillen; private press material, including titles from the Cuala Press of W.B. Yeats and his sister Elizabeth; delightful publications from Lucien Pisarro's Eragny Press; D.H. Lawrence's privately printed Pansies (signed); and T.S. Eliot's Marina (also signed); superb examples of Indigenous portraiture.

To view these items (and much besides) visit us at Stand 31 at the Melbourne Rare Book Fair this coming weekend, 6–8 July 2018.

Our latest catalogue commences with about a dozen rare Australian WW1 battalion histories, including a signed copy, in the original wrappers, of Longmore’s Eggs-A-Cook! The Story of the Forty-Fourth. These are followed in quick succession by small sections on a variety of subjects, invariably containing a treasure or three.

There’s aviation (with a copy of the first edition of Flying the Arctic signed by Hubert Wilkins, and a large signed certificate from the Byrd Antarctic Expedition, 1928-30); the Boer War (letters from Lord Baden-Powell to an Australian comrade-in-arms, and an impressive portrait photograph of three South Australian officers in London for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee); books on bookplates (not least, Gartner’s The Bookplates of William Hunter, one of only 50 copies); Burke and Wills (Foster, Kirby, Norman – even a book from Robert O’Hara Burke’s own shelves); big game hunting (20 items, all pertaining to India) … and we’re still only up to the letter B. We’ll leave the rest of the alphabet to you!