Highlights
Each year our exhibitors bring rare, beautiful and unusual items for sale. Here are just a few of the exhibitors' highlights you can expect to see at the Fair in 2022!
A natural history of the birds of New South Wales
$55000
London : Henry H. Bohn, 1838. A fine example, in original condition, of one of the rarest illustrated works of Australian natural history.
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Views in the South Seas from drawings by the late James Webber,
$85000
London : Boydell & Co., 1808. First edition (later issue, as usually found). The plates illustrate romanticised depictions of the landscape and inhabitants encountered on the voyage, including depictions of what is modern-day New Zealand, Tonga, Tahiti and French Polynesia, Indonesia, Macao, Vietnam and Russia. It is considered one of the great colour plate books of the nineteenth century, Davidson writes that 'these views should be added to a collection but they are so seldom available that a collector would be fortunate to obtain a copy'.
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Codex Seraphinianus
$6500
The first edition of the ever mysterious Codex Seraphinianus by Italian artist Luigi Serafini (1949-). Possibly an illustrated encyclopaedia of an alternate universe, Serafini has alluded that it is perhaps all just the thoughts of a cat passed through his hand. The Codex is written in an imaginary language and illustrated phantasmagorically throughout. This being the true first edition published in 2 volumes by Italian art publisher Franco Maria Ricci.
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William Jackson Hooker. Exotic Flora...1823-27
$32000
A very fine and attractively bound copy of the first and only edition of one of Hooker's rarest and most beautifully illustrated works; an important work, it includes specimens from Australia described by Robert Brown, colonial botanist Charles Fraser, and Allan Cunningham. A particularly notable inclusion is the Banksia verticillata (no. 96) from western Australia, first noticed at King George Sound by Archibald Menzies on the Vancouver voyage “and brought by him to our gardens in 1794”; this banksia, now considered vulnerable, was later codified by Robert Brown when he returned to the region
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A portrait miniature of Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Brisbane, sixth Governor of New South Wales, 1821-1825
$95000
A fine portrait of a distinguished administrator whose political and social legacies were of immense importance in the shaping of the Colony of New South Wales. Portraits of such significant early Australian figures are of the utmost rarity.
[Attributed to Nathaniel Plimer, probably 1803-1804]. Portrait on ivory, in its original nine-carat gold mount, 70 x 53 mm; verso of mount engraved ‘Lieutt Coll Thoms Brisbane’; the sitter is portrayed with his hair powdered and wearing a white shirt, scarlet coat with gold epaulettes and black stock.
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[Self-improvement Sugoroku]. 出世双六. [Shusse sugoroku].
$350
Colourful folding sugoroku, 56 x 76 cm, tiny nick lower margin, a very good copy.
A sugoroku game created for New Year 1935 and published by the children's magazine Yonen Kurabu. This is an example of the 'self-improvement' genre of sugoroku, where the images in the game provide moral instruction about the importance of improving one's lot in life and contributing to the nation. Each square in the game depicts a person who (we are told) started from humble beginnings but, though dedication and hard work, achieved personal success and contributed to the wellbeing of society.
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Notes d'un pilote disparu (1916-1917) "Lieutenant Marc" [VILLARS, Jean Beraud]
$750
Paris : Hachette, 1918. First edition.
Small octavo, [x], 224, [4] pp., contemporary gilt lettered quarter green cloth.
An attractive copy.
Originally published under the nom de guerre ‘Lieutenant Marc’ in 1918, the real author was identified in the 1970's as Jean Beraud Villars.
This book was so critical of the French military and aircraft manufacturers (who he alleged supplied inferior aircraft) that Villars could not publish it under his own name. This is the censored and redacted French first edition.
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