Catalogues

Picture Book XII

Picture Book XII

Picture Book XII, our Melbourne Rare Book Fair catalogue for 2025, is by design a list of highlights.

Literature and children’s books include a superb copy of the deluxe edition of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907); signed copies of first editions by Virginia Woolf (Orlando, 1928), Stephen King (Six Stories, 1997), and Mem Fox (Possum Magic, 1983); and the very rare Bib and Bub Painting Book (1932), privately published by May Gibbs herself.

Botany is a real strength this time, with works by Robert Brown (Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae, 1810, and a presentation copy of the rare Supplementus Primum, 1830); Joseph Hooker (On the Flora of Australia, 1859); Charles Darwin (On ... Orchids, 1862, and other works); and Ferdinand von Mueller (Eucalyptographia, 1879-84, a presentation set inscribed to Dr David Wilkie).

'Treatment of the Horse in Australia | by Geo Hamilton 1864' is a complete suite of 11 original photographs mounted on cards captioned by the author. Possibly unique, it precedes the very rare published work of the same name, and is vastly superior in all respects. Other photographic items of consequence include a Disderi stereo daguerreotype of the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle; an Australian hand-coloured half-plate ambrotype of a crude bush homestead (circa 1855-65); Duryea’s Adelaide Album (circa 1866), with its acclaimed panorama; and two superlative portraits of Indigenous Australians by Charles Mountford (from 1940 negatives).

The wrap-around cover on our catalogue reproduces a portion of an extraordinary watercolour panorama (over three metres wide) of Shaggy Ridge, the site of a crucial and hard-won victory by Australian soldiers against Japanese forces in New Guinea, produced in the field in early 1944 by Private William Ellis Green, later better known as the famous cartoonist WEG ...

Catalogue 85

Catalogue 85

General Sir Harry Chauvel’s annotated map from the Battle of Beersheba on 31 October 1917 is the stand-out item in our latest catalogue. ‘The capture of Beersheba, and the final battle at Megiddo remain some of the finest feats achieved by mounted troops in any war’ (AWM). A collection of photographs and printed ephemera relating to the First World War service of his younger brother James Chauvel is also on offer.

Other items of strong military interest include a set of the official biography of Winston Churchill, complete with all 13 matching companion volumes (21 volumes); and a complete set of the Official History of Australia in the War, 1914-1918 (12 volumes) in exceptional condition.

There are numerous works on Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, including exploration, travel, tribal art and anthropology; about a dozen works on Carl Fabergé; catalogues raisonnés (all with original lithographs) of Braque, Buffet, Chagall, Clavé, Delvaux and Miro; and copies of Verve containing original lithographs by Braque, Matisse, and (in a suite on the four seasons) Chagall, Miro, Rattner, and Klee.

And yet again, we have sourced some interesting and unusual trade catalogues, ranging from a group on 1900s flour milling, to others from the 1930s dealing with typewriters, calculators and cash registers; ornamental wrought ironwork; tiles and sanitary ware; and from 1946, Playthings, a Sydney toy catalogue.

Catalogue 84

Catalogue 84

We welcome in the new year with some impressive recent acquisitions, not least The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones, the third and best edition of 1868, with 112 chromolithographs. Less colourful, but considerably rarer – we know of no other example – is S.A. Legislative Council, 1868, an album of superb large-format portrait photographs by Townsend Duryea of all eighteen sitting members of the South Australian upper house in the year 1868.

The Catalogue of the Greek and Etruscan Vases in the British Museum is complete in five volumes (1893-1925); our copy of Aaron Arrowsmith’s A Comparative Atlas of Ancient and Modern Geography ... for the Use of Eton School (1828) is fully hand-coloured; Bushman Paintings (1909) contains 54 loose chromocollotypes of rock art of the San peoples of southern Africa; Enid Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island (1942, third impression), the first title in the famous series, is complete with the first edition dustwrapper … the items on offer are nothing if not eclectic!

Catalogue 83

Catalogue 83

Our last catalogue for the year contains some rare and impressive presentation copies, including The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Spencer and Gillen’s first joint publication in 1899, ‘a landmark in anthropological history’. We have two other presentation sets from Spencer, and a signed letter. From General Sir John Monash, we have a presentation copy of The Australian Victories in France in 1918 (1920), offered together with a signed portrait photograph and typed letter. Our copy of John Betjeman's Collected Poems (1958, first edition) contains a signed Christmas card with an unpublished poem in Betjeman’s hand.

Photography again features prominently: items include an album compiled by a South Australian participant en route to the aerial pageant at Essendon Aerodrome in May 1929; a complete set of 100 stereographs of India (plus part-sets on Jerusalem and Japan); and a stunning portrait by Charles Scott of a young Indigenous woman, Clara, near Oodnadatta in 1903-04.

Time on your hands, and resolving to read more this New Year? You can’t go past the Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian, especially in the handsome Folio Society edition, complete in 20 volumes …

We close for a short break on Christmas Eve, reopening on Monday 6 January. Our new business hours will be Monday to Thursday, 10 am to 5.30 pm. Semi-retirement? Hardly! Fridays will be spent getting on top of the veritable mountain of valuable paper in the warehouse and multiple storage facilities. You have been warned: our catalogues and auctions will be more frequent, and more tempting!

As ever, many thanks for your support this year, and all the best for Christmas and the New Year.

Mick, Sue, Tom, Robert, David and Harry.

Auction of Rare Books, Photographs, Maps, Prints & Ephemera

Auction of Rare Books, Photographs, Maps, Prints & Ephemera

Australian voyages include works by Magra, Cook, Forster, Hunter, Collins, Phillip, Tench, Bligh, Barrington, King, Stokes and MacGillivray. Inland exploration includes works by Carron, Sturt, Mitchell, McKinlay, and Warburton, and the four-volume report on the Horn Expedition.

Photographs include the very rare Album by W. Blackwood of Sydney Banks (1859); an 1860s album containing cartes de visite of China, Japan and Melbourne; an 1889 album of 24 photographs by J.W. Lindt, including four of his famous studio tableaux of Indigenous Australians, and four superb plates from his 1885 journey to New Guinea; numerous albums of strong Australasian interest; travel albums featuring Palestine and Samoa; large-format photographs by Frank Hurley of Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914; and The American Monument. Special Edition, one of only 150 copies containing an original signed photograph by Lee Friedlander.

Maps include the first dedicated English map of Australia by Emmanuel Bowen (1744), two by Freycinet (1812), four by John Arrowsmith (South and South-Eastern Australia, 1838 to 1846), and Smith's New General Atlas (1809).

Of the utmost rarity is the substantial run of 111 issues of the Mafeking Mail Special Siege Slip [or Edition], consigned by a descendant of one of families besieged in Mafeking for 217 days between October 1899 and May 1900. 

South Australia Illustrated (1847) by George French Angas is one of the classic Australian colour plate books; Idyllia (1922) is one of only 133 copies with five signed etchings by Norman Lindsay; The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell (2010) needs no introduction …

The catalogue concludes with 35 lots of Gould prints, including the Superb Fairywren and the Antilopine Wallaroo.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

This is an online-only timed auction hosted by Invaluable.com. There will be no in-room bidding for this sale.

Lots will begin to close starting at 2 pm (ACDT) on Monday 9 December 2024.

Buyer's premium: 20%

Online bidding fee: 5%

Click on each lot 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.

Please ensure you have read the Auction Details available on the auction page.

If you have any questions, please contact us on (+61) 08 8223 1111 or at treloars@treloars.com

View and bid on Invaluable.com

Catalogue 82

Catalogue 82

The highlight of our latest catalogue would be a highlight wherever it appeared: a superlative copy of Duryea’s Adelaide Album (1866), featuring as its frontispiece a three-foot wide panorama of the fledgling city less than 30 years after its foundation. Contemporary advertisements indicate that apart from the panorama, these were bespoke albums – unique by design.

Other singular examples of photographica are a very rare stereo-daguerreotype by André Disderi of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855, and a collection of 65 snapshots taken by Captain Samuel White while on active service during the Boer War, before he achieved fame as an ornithologist and conservationist. There are also numerous books on international photographers, not least Nagano, Narahara, Inamura, Kawada, Holomicek, Meatyard and Serrano.

The large number of art books includes Die Buecher (1975), an early work on the Swiss artist Markus Raetz (1941-2020): it is signed, and contains an original signed woodcut. The two works by Garry Shead each contain an original signed ink drawing.

Australian botany is well represented, with works on plants of Capricornia, poisonous plants, grevilleas, dryandras and several others specific to the flora of Western Australia.

With over 200 items, there’s plenty more to choose from, so happy browsing!

Catalogue 81

Catalogue 81

Recent acquisitions and some unusual items unearthed as we continue to excavate our warehouse give the latest catalogue some of its strengths.

Not least, we have both the first and second editions of the superlative colour-plate book, Foreign Field Sports (1814 + 1813, and 1819), each one containing the Supplement of New South Wales, with 10 hand-coloured aquatints depicting various aspects of Indigenous life in the Port Jackson region. The 1813 first edition of the supplement is described by Jonathan Wantrup as ‘the very first book on the Australian Aborigines, a fact not often acknowledged’.

Our copy of the deluxe edition of Mortimer Menpes’s Durbar (1903) is not only signed and limited to 1000 copies – it is one of 100 copies containing an original signed watercolour by Menpes.

Two rare works on Singapore are Song Ong Siang’s One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore (1923), and Charles Burton Buckley’s An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore (1902, two volumes), the latter from the collection of Sir Ernest Woodford Birch, son of J.W.W. Birch, the first British Resident of Perak, assassinated there in 1875.

Any one of the 96 issues of the Peninsula Press, the Gallipoli field newsletter, is fiendishly rare: we have 13 of them, offered for sale separately.

The success of the Eiffel Tower at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1889 inspired the British to attempt to go one better. All that remains to show for it is the Descriptive Illustrated Catalogue of the Sixty-Eight Competitive Designs for the Great Tower for London (1890). This item won’t last long! And we also have the only other British publication that might upstage this one for outrageous/courageous eccentricity: the complete set of first editions of the published diaries of James Lees-Milne (1975 to 2005).

Happy browsing!

Melbourne Rare Book Fair 2024

Melbourne Rare Book Fair 2024

A complete list of our stock for the Melbourne Rare Book Fair 2024