Catalogues

Online Catalogue #44

Online Catalogue #44

It may be that a catalogue from an antiquarian bookseller is the last thing you are looking for at the present time. But this is what we do, and old habits die hard. Hopefully you will find something in our latest offering to lift the spirits or engage the mind.

Highlights include a signed original print of Max Dupain's iconic photograph 'Sunbaker', and early issues of Verve complete with the sumptuous colour lithographs by the likes of Klee, Miró, Kandinsky, Chagall and Matisse.

Happy browsing, and stay healthy!

Online Catalogue #43

Online Catalogue #43

Our latest catalogue is another dose of the mixture as before: books, autographs, photographs and realia. The testimonial presented to the original John Furphy by his fellow-Methodists in 1909 when he left Shepparton and retired to Melbourne; the camel-hair blanket-sleeping bag used by Douglas Mawson on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-14; the rare 1866 account of the Ti-Ping Revolution by Lin-le (Augustus Lindley); an album of vintage panoramic photographs of devastation on the Western Front; an Arthur Mailey self-caricature in an Orient Line booklet signed by members of the 1953 Australian Test squad … you get the drift.

Less rarified fare includes a wide range of books on Egyptology, numerous titles from the Brindabella Press, and interesting items relating to art, literature, exploration and natural history.

Online Catalogue #42

Online Catalogue #42

Our latest list includes rare nineteenth-century colour plate books (natural history and travel), numerous items on Australian bookplates, important Antarctic exploration material, and a miscellany of unusual, rare or unique photographs, signed copies, and ephemera.

Happy browsing!

Rare Book Auction | 12 October 2019

Rare Book Auction | 12 October 2019

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.

Buyer's premium: 20%
Online bidding fee: 3%
Currency: Australian Dollars
Competitive domestic and international shipping rates
Mawson | Delprat Exhibition

Mawson | Delprat Exhibition

Exhibition 16–27 September 2019
196 North Terrace, Adelaide
10am to 5pm, Monday to Saturday

It is our great pleasure to offer here a selection of items, some rare and important, others unusual or curious, but at all times interesting, and with the guaranteed provenance of Antarctic explorer Sir Douglas Mawson and
his father-in-law, Guillaume Daniel Delprat, General Manager of BHP.

Highlights include
a seventeenth-century Dutch armoire; rare Antarctic photographs by Frank Hurley, T.W. Edgeworth David and Andrew Watson (among the first images of that part of the continent); artefacts taken on Mawson's Antarctic expeditions; and a singular oil painting by Charles Harrisson, artist and biologist on Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911–1914, presented to Paquita and Douglas on their wedding day in March 1914.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE CATALOGUE

Click here to view the price list.

Online Catalogue #41

Online Catalogue #41

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!

Online Catalogue #40

Online Catalogue #40

Some genuine treasures have come our way since we prepared our recent book fair catalogue: Strehlow's Songs of Central Australia (a superb copy); Kempe's Galtjintana-Pepa Kristianirberaka Mbontala (the first Aranda book of Christian instruction and worship, 1891); and Giles’s Australia Twice Traversed (Jimmy Andrews’s set – he was one of only three companions with Giles on his second expedition in 1873-74, on which Alfred Gibson lost his life).

Important Australian colonial art includes Mann’s Present Picture of New South Wales (1811, with the 1884 facsimile plates); Maclehose’s Picture of Sydney (1838); Gill’s Diggers & Diggings of Victoria as they are in 1855 (1856); and a series of four superb original watercolours depicting a kangaroo hunt, executed by John Eden Savill in 1876.

There are numerous signed items by a diverse range of important figures, including Laurence Sterne; Hallam, 2nd Baron Tennyson (Australia’s second Governor-General); D.H. Lawrence; Herbert Hoover; Birdwood of Anzac; Sir Ronald Storrs; Joe Darling; Ion Idriess; and Don Bradman.

Ornithology is well-represented this time: Broinowski’s Birds of Australia (1890-91); the facsimile edition of Gould’s Birds of Australia (1972-75); and numerous scholarly press publications of more recent vintage.

And there’s plenty more!

Picture Book 9

Picture Book 9

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.