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!
Silk Shawl Sample Book from Wo Sang Company, Canton.
$2500
A sample book featuring 46 hand embroidered patterned samples for shawls, 2 swatches of uncoloured silk fabric and 32 silk colour swatches. Green cloth covered boards with gilt title and date on the upper cover, marbled endpapers, re-enforced at the inner hinges but otherwise firm and sound. An extremely attractive sample book with the colours bright and vibrant and measuring 20 x 30cm.
Canton. 1928.
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Traite des Maladies des Femmes Grosses,
$2500
Treatise on the Diseases of Pregnant Women together with Observations on the Pregnancy and Childbirth of Women and on Their Diseases & Those of Newborn Children. Two establishing volumes in the science of obstetrics by Francois Mauriceau.
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[Dreamy Story of Australia and other essays by Professor Shigetaka Shiga]. 濠洲夢物語. 志賀重昂先生. [Gōshū yume monogatari. Shiga Shigetaka sensei.]
$425
Folding chart, 41pp, paperback, 21 x 15cm, text browned throughout, tide mark on chipped and browned wrappers, spine worn with loss of paper covering. Still a sound copy.
This small book contains six pieces on Australia by Shiga Shigetaka (1863 - 1927), a Japanese geographer and thinker who travelled widely in the late 19th century. He visited Australia in 1886 during his trip around the Pacific and published a book, Nanyo Jiji (Current Situation in the Pacific) in 1887.
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Miniature portrait of Elizabeth Flinders, Matthew Flinders’ “dearest mother”
$45000
A charming miniature portrait of Elizabeth Flinders, the much-loved step-mother of the navigator Matthew. No other portrait of Elizabeth is recorded, making this a significant addition to the history of Flinders’ immediate family, not least because a small series of affectionate letters from him to Elizabeth is extant.
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Philip Gidley King. Original Drawing of River and Trees.
$15000
An accomplished landscape signed by Philip Gidley King (1758-1808), Governor of the penal colonies at Norfolk Island and New South Wales during the early years of settlement. The unidentified scene is executed in graphite on laid paper bearing the watermark of Government issue paper of the period 1790-1810. The drawing is skilled, especially in the treatment of topography and vegetation, with an attention to detail befitting a naval officer of the era. Original art by any of the first colonial Governors is enormously rare.
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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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