Picture Book XI
Picture Book XI plays to our strengths, as ever – literature, art, manuscripts, photographs, militaria, exploration, maps – and there are many highlights.
Our set of The South Polar Times (1907-14, three volumes, two with dustwrappers) has the provenance of Elizabeth Dawson-Lambton (1837-1926), a significant benefactor of Ernest Shackleton and his expeditions. We also have the deluxe large-paper issue of Shackleton’s The Heart of the Antarctic (1909, three volumes), one of only 300 sets with the supplementary volume The Antarctic Book, signed by 16 members of the expedition.
Mawson’s The Home of the Blizzard (Philadelphia, 1915, two volumes, first edition, first state, with dustwrappers) is upstaged by our signed set of the London first edition, second state, purchased while the catalogue was being printed.
Maps include two adjoining gores from Coronelli's influential three-and-a-half-foot globe of the world, showing most of the continent of Australia, titled ‘Het Niew Hollandt | Nuova Hollanda’ (circa 1701). Stanford’s A Map of Australia (1879) is a fine, rare and impressive mammoth-format hand-coloured map on four sheets (approximately 1950 × 2620 mm when assembled) – even rarer and more impressive than Stanford's earlier Library Map of Australasia (1859).
Of the utmost significance is General Sir Harry Chauvel’s personal campaign map for the Battle of Beersheba (31 October 1917), with his annotations (‘better gallop into action’). He also features in the collection of photographs and ephemera relating to the war service of his younger brother Major James Chauvel. Another exceptional group of items is a presentation copy of Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash’s The Australian Victories in France in 1918 (1920), with a signed portrait photograph and a letter written not long before his death in 1931.







