Welcome to the first sale on our new auction site. We envisage it will be the first of many. Indeed, work is well under way on three separate specialist auctions – Military History, Gastronomy, and History of Medicine – scheduled for the first few months of the new year. All three are based around single-vendor collections.

The present auction is a mixed-vendor sale, and with many of the 455 lots we have instructions to put very few impediments between you and temptation!

These few highlights should aid the process ...

• A small archive of seventeen vintage photographs and accompanying correspondence by the contemporary Austrian photographer Renate Graf.
• Dr Saleh Soubhy’s Pèlerinage à la Mecque et à Médine (Cairo, 1894) is an excellent copy in the original wrappers. This is a very rare account of pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina in 1888 and 1891.
• Fred Lynde’s Descriptive Illustrated Catalogue of the Sixty-Eight Competitive Designs for the Great Tower for London (London, 1890). All that remains of these competitors to the Eiffel Tower is this rare and delightful picture book.
• Interesting antiquarian items include Cavendish's New Method to dress Horses (1667), and Charts and Plates to La Pérouse's Voyage (London, 1798).
• P.G. Wodehouse's Mike. A Public School Story; although the fourth impression of 1919, is complete with the utterly rare dustwrapper.
• Aleister Crowley’s The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922) is the first edition of his first published novel.
• Lynd Ward’s early graphic novel Vertigo. A Novel in Woodcuts (New York, 1937).
• A Japanese shunga handscroll with 16 hand-painted erotic scenes.

Broad subjects include Australiana, exploration and travel, literature, antiquarian books, natural history, and erotica.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE CATALOGUE

Bidding options:

• Bid live online at auctions.treloars.com
• Bid live on our free iOS and Android Apps
• Leave absentee bids (an absentee bid form can be downloaded here)
• Bid live by telephone (lots with a lower estimate of at least $900)

If you need any assistance, please contact us at treloars@treloars.com or on +61 8 8223 1111

Our current catalogue features a collection of approximately 200 books on campanology, offered as one lot. If that doesn’t ring your bell, move on to the literature and illustrated works. We have half a dozen titles from the Cuala Press by W.B. Yeats; a large-paper copy of T.S. Eliot’s Marina (1930), one of 400 signed copies; Ngaio Marsh’s Death and the Dancing Footman (1942), a fine copy with the dustwrapper; and Verve, Numbers 27 and 28 (1952), a double issue containing 29 original lithographs.

Singular or unique items include a photograph of ‘Breaker’ Morant, in a small group of troopers in Adelaide in January 1900; a copy of The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), the seminal work on anthropology, signed by both Spencer and Gillen; and a husband-and-wife pair of 1850s South Australian daguerreotypes.

Happy browsing!

John Kauffmann (1864-1942) was born in the small village of Truro in country South Australia; he became an internationally recognized pioneering photo-impressionist by the first decade of the twentieth century. His images were awarded medals at major competitions, but, perhaps more significantly, they were sold for high prices at a series of one-man exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney. His trademark was soft focus — think sombre moods and misty aspects. His work fell out of favour in the last two decades of his life, but his creativity continued to evolve. In the early 1930s, he produced a series of 'portraits of living flowers', some of which must be numbered among his best work.

This retrospective, containing 40 images and other material from the artist's estate, includes vintage prints from all periods of his long working life. All items are for sale, and this exhibition represents a unique opportunity to purchase important artworks with impeccable provenance.

Exhibition 16–28 February 2018
10am–5pm, Monday to Saturday
196 North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia

Our current catalogue contains a number of rarities from a collection we helped build some forty years ago – ouch! That small yelp is for a couple of reasons – where did all those years go? – and another fine collection is being dismantled. But there is more than a degree of satisfaction to be had from what we have coined the ‘pre-deceased estate sale’. Admittedly, it is a different form of satisfaction to that of acquisition and custody, but there is a lot to be said for overseeing the orderly dispersal of a significant aspect of one’s personal life in a considered and professional manner (to say nothing of the capital gains!).

Accordingly, for your delectation, we have eight rare works on Australian cycling and motoring, by the likes of Birtles, Dutton, Murif and Pearson. This does not include five titles by Michael Terry, which we mention in the company of other inland explorers and expeditions: Cadell, the Calvert Expedition, the Horn Expedition, Lindsay, and Winnecke (including a signed book).

Literature is well-represented, with sixteen Brindabella Press-related publications, half a dozen Angry Penguin items, a signed Arthur Rackham (Undine), and the very rare Edwardian illustrated Australian children’s book, Some Childrens' [sic] Songs by Marion Alsop & Dorothy McCrae.

There are rare and important vintage photographs by Frank Hurley, John Kauffmann, and May Moore, to go with, as usual, our unusual miscellany of items that are either unique, quirky, ephemeral or merely worth reading. We wish you profitable browsing!