Online Catalogue #62

Online Catalogue #62

We thought the cracking copies of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s first two books, Mollie’s Bunyip (1904) and Mollie’s Staircase (1906), would be the children’s book highlights of our current catalogue. Then we purchased Benjamin Forster’s anonymously-issued Botanical Illustrations of the Twenty-Four Classes in the Linnaean System of Vegetables (1813): despite its prosaic title, this miniature book with 48 hand-coloured wood engravings would crown any international collection.

Fully one-third of this 200-item catalogue contains autograph material of one kind or another: marks of provenance, authors’ signatures or inscriptions, signed documents, photographs or letters. Signatories range from prime ministers to presidents, musicians to Nobel laureates, self-published authors to world-famous cricketers. However, the stellar item is a small group of letters from the archive of Professor T.G.H. Strehlow. They are primarily from Pastor F.W. Albrecht, who replaced Strehlow’s father as superintendent of the Finke River Mission at Hermannsburg in Central Australia in 1927. These letters, written in 1957-58, are of strong interest in themselves, but greater significance must be attached to the accompanying letters in Western Aranda (Arrernte) from five elders. We have obtained full translations, and our catalogue record is worth reading, whatever your collecting interests may be.

Off you go!