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Alphabet. 大新板英吉利二十六文字 [Dai Shinban Igirisu Nijuroku Moji]. Osaka, Koshika Kichibe [1850s?]. Woodcut broadside 25x35cm, printed in dark blue. Rumpled and somewhat ragged but a pretty decent survival. Au$450

Illicit news sheets - kawaraban - which look much like this were a staple of street life in Japan and come the foreigners the kawaraban producers went crazy. Come the Meiji restoration and modernisation books which taught the English alphabet and odd selections of vocabulary proliferated but this is the first sheet teaching the English alphabet - it is specific about that - and numbers I've seen. This is education for the commonest folk.


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>Furuya Korin. 竹づく志 [Take Zukushi]. Kyoto, Unsodo 1906 (Meiji 39). 18x25cm publisher's boards; 50 colour woodcut designs on 25 double leaves, accordian folding. Light signs of use or offsetting, a rather good copy. Au$1,650

Exquisite printing, with metallic inks and dustings of mica, of often exquisite designs by the foremost of neo-Rimpa designers. One of maybe four independent portfolios of designs by Korin each devoted to one plant. This one is bamboo. Others include pines and plums.
Korin, whose name is taken from the original master, started as a gifted but unsurprising designer - prolific and workmanlike in ambition compared to Sekka. But come the twentieth century - the final years of his life; he died young in 1910 - his albums of designs (rather than art) need no apology.


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>Nakazawa Hiromitsu, Kobayashi Shokichi & Okano Sakae. 東洋未来双六 [Toyo Mirai Sugoroku]. Tokyo, Hakubunkan 1907 (Meiji 40). Colour printed broadside, 55x78cm. Minor flaws and signs of use, some ink splodges on the back. Au$650

A view, or a panoply of views, of a future Asia. Some of these vignettes of what's to come are obvious enough - schoolgirls at rifle drill and sumo wrestlers in striped bathers - but a few seem fairly recondite to me. I'm not sure how much is optimistic, how much is dire warning and how much is wearily stoic.
Nakazawa, Kobayashi and Okano, still young, had been fellow students at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and of Kuroda Seiki and collaborated on the five volume Nihon Meisho Shasei Kiko, issued over several years.


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KIRMESS, C.H. [i.e. Frank Fox?]. The Australian Crisis. Melbourne, George Robertson 1909. Octavo publisher's decorated red cloth blocked in black and white (a little flecked); 336pp. A nice copy. Au$300

First edition, Australian issue. Presumably the first binding - it also came in undecorated red cloth. One of the classic yellow peril novels, this chronicles (from 1922 looking back to 1912) the Japanese invasion of Australia - first by wile and cunnning, then by war. It is of course a bit more complex; there is social turmoil and political breakdown, civil war and the abandonment, if not betrayal, of Australia by Britain. The central section of the book is the romance of the White Guard - the volunteer militia - and their guerilla warfare against the Japanese in the Northern Territory.


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WYLIE, I.A.R. [Ida Alexa Ross]. The Paupers of Portman Square. London, Cassell [1913]. Octavo publisher's cloth blocked in black. A bit of browning, a rather good copy. Au$165

First edition? Published in London and New York in 1913. I wonder how much Wylie drew on her own childhood for this novel of feckless parenthood. The ever reliable Spectator dismissed it with customary contempt: "Seldom have we met people so amazingly unlike real men and women," but I suspect they would have regarded a biography of Wylie's father equally unlikely. She wrote this of her father: "From the day of his birth to the hour of his death he never had a penny that he could legitimately call his own. If by some strange chance he had earned it, he already owed it several times over, and it was only an additional reason for borrowing more. Quite often he didn't have a penny of any sort, and there were days in our large absurd house in London when there was no food for anyone except the bailiff occupying our one completely furnished room." (My Life With George).
For those who care, I find no copy of this Melbourne born author's book in any Australian library.


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Pioneering Nordic murder

ROSENKRANTZ, Baron Palle. The Magistrate's Own Case. London, Methuen 1908. Octavo publisher's red cloth decorated in gilt (spine a little discoloured); 32pp publisher's list for 1911 at the end - clearly not a fast seller, this book. Prize inscription for spelling on the front fly; quite a good copy. Au$165

First English edition of this thriller which, despite what the sloppy Encyclopedia of Nordic Crime Fiction says, is not a translation of Mordet i Vestermarie (1902), Denmark's first detective novel. This particular Danish crime is the murder of an English lord in Germany and the magistrate is German, most cosmopolitan.
Rosenkrantz was maybe Denmark's busiest writer in the early 20th century - he had to support a noble's lifestyle which had already seen him in trouble when he was arrested for misuse of public funds and bankrupted.


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TURNER, George Frederic. The Toad and the Amazon. London, Ward Lock 1907. Octavo publisher's decorated cloth blocked in white and gilt (minor signs of use, a little white gone from the spine); frontispiece and one other plate. A pretty good copy. Au$250

First edition. I'm not sure why Turner's books have disappeared so thoroughly. The style is a bit precious but no more than most of his contemporaries and the repartee is often witty and amusing. The necessary conceit - or gimmick - to keep us reading: a pair of society gentlefolk disguise themselves to follow their passion - boxing - might seem ordinary until we discover that one is a beautiful young woman. In case our interest flags, cut to the meeting of the high society Entomophagites where the abolition of section C of Rule 15 is being argued. Section C is the requirement that any outsider who stumbles over or into the Entomophagites is summarily executed. Needless, maybe, to say, our hero is going to be lured into blundering into the Entomophagite stronghold by his rival for the beautiful Amazon.
Turner, a London architect, published a decent number of novels between 1906 and 1920, most with some thrilling or macabre twist, and all apparently sank with barely a ripple.


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Venal sex and betrayal

Henry Fielding. The Letter-Writers: or, a New Way to Keep a Wife at Home. A farce in three acts. As it is acted at the Theatre in the Hay-Market. Written by Scriblerus Secundus. London, printed and sold by J. Roberts 1731. Diminutive slender quarto later blind panelled calf by Riviere (wear to spine, front hinge cracked); 48pp. Trimmed a bit close along the top touching "The" on the title but above the headlines throughout; some natural browning but a good, quite fresh copy. Au$1,250

First edition and hard to find. Rushed through the press and published the day the play opened - the 24th of March - to little purpose. Modern critics have described The Letter-Writers as the best of 18th century farces and as dismal but Fielding's contemporaries don't seem to have had any disagreements. It lasted three days and wasn't reprinted for a long time.


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More venal sex and betrayal

FIELDING, Henry. The Modern Husband. A Comedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane. London, for J.Watts 1732. Octavo later gilt calf (spine a bit darkened). Some browning, a good, fresh copy, complete with the publisher's list at the end. With the bookplate of Viscount Birkenhead which seems to cover a smaller plate - perhaps his own predating his elevation? Au$475

First edition. A copy that marks the heady days of the Fielding craze of the late 19th and early twentieth centuries when every good copy that could be found was banged into smart bindings by Riviere or Sangorski and flogged to millionaires. This binding isn't signed but looks Riviere.
The Modern Husband was so thoroughly modern that it took a brave company to perform it and they were hissed on the first night. That a man could sell his wife to pay his gambling debts and then sue his customer for not paying enough was no surprise to London audiences but many did not want to see it dissected on stage. Enough did though and it had a respectable run. Fielding "began to think it was a good play till the Grub-street Journal assur'd me it was not."


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No more sex

FIELDING, Henry. A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor, for Amending Their Morals, and for Rendering Them Useful Members of the Society. To which is added, a plan of the buildings proposed, with proper elevations. Drawn by an eminent hand. London, for A. Millar 1753. Octavo later calf by Riviere (spine darkened and hinges cracked); large folding plate with plans and elevations after designs by Thomas Gibson. An excellent, fresh copy inside. Au$1,800

First edition and hard to find; harder to find in good condition and even harder to find complete with the plate. We are a long way here from the farcical sex, betrayal and venality of his early plays. Many of the great social reforms are born from such simple things as: neither gentleman nor shopkeeper can relax during the necessary pleasure of shopping for fear of beggars and thieves. Fielding was not heartless - he does evoke compassion for families "oppressed with hunger, nakedness, cold, and filth, and with diseases ... who could look into such a scene as this, and be affected only in his nostrils?" - but he does seem tough from this distance. His great plan here, too ambitious even for his parliamentary champions, was to scrap the poor laws altogether, start again, and build a monumental poorhouse, out beyond Hammersmith, where all the poor, honest or not, could be set to work and become an asset to the nation. The estimated £100,000 invested in the buildings could show a profit within a couple of years according to his figures.
The architect of Fielding's great Palladian prison is not, no matter what Fielding scholars have said, the portrait painter Thomas Gibson. It seems obvious that our Gibson is the obscure but well connected architect of the 1750s Palladian Marchmont House and may well be the father of architect George Gibson who claimed, according to James Elmes, that his - George's - father had been architect to Queen Caroline.


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Translators take note please

>Kyokutei Bakin. [sometimes called Takizawa Bakin]. 夢想兵衛胡蝶物語 [Muso byoe kocho monogatari - A Dreamer's Butterfly Tale]. Tokyo, Haishi Shuppansha 1882 [Meiji 15]. Two volumes 225x155mm, publisher's embossed yellow wrappers; a half-page, ten double page and five full page woodcut illustrations by Yoshitoshi. A tiny bit of nibbling to a couple of page edges, a good fresh copy. Au$750

Bakin's imaginary voyage fantasia was first published in 1809-10 and this is, I deduce, the second edition, revised or corrected from Bakin's own copy of the first edition; the first with Yoshitoshi's illustrations. Further editions followed thick and fast but apart from a partial translation in The Chrysanthemum (Yokohama 1882) I can't find an English version exists - particularly frustrating as Yoshitoshi's illustrations are magnetic. The surreal and grotesque are always hard to resist - and Yoshitoshi was a master among masters - and I don't think I've ever seen a better illustration, a better description, of the world of an opium smoker.
The best account of the book I've found is in a 1909 letter from Minakata Kumagusu to the publisher Gowans & Gray who had approached him for a translation of a Bakin work of his choice. He chose this, "the only book that ever took me out of bed 30 minutes sooner than I wished to get up", and described it as something like Gulliver's Travels in which a man, decided there is nothing more to learn in his own land, determines to travel the world. He is told the means - a kite - in a vision and sets off to explore the lands of Infancy, Lust (high, medium and low grades), Drunkenness, Greed, Trouble, Sorrows, Falsehood and Happiness. Unfortunately Gowan & Gray wouldn't spring for Kumagusu's fee and that was the end of that. At least we have Yoshitoshi.


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>Sugoroku. 少女のりもの双六 [Shojo Norimono Sugoroku]. Tokyo, Jiji Shinpo 1920 (Taisho 9). Colour printed broadside, 55x79cm. Folded, minor signs of use. Au$425

Girls on the go, from the pram to a triumphant motorcade; with about every form of transport between. Even flying, which is very new for Japanese women. I wonder if Japan had a second woman flyer by 1919 when this was prepared.
A carefully judged aspirational game for Japan's future woman: she has embraced and mastered modernity but not discarded tradition. She is not cropped or bobbed; she is not loud and unnecessarily demonstrative; she isn't and won't ever be a flapper.


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>Ornamental Cement Tile Factory. Johannesburg. Paving Floors in Any Colour or Decorative Design - special marbled mosaic titles ... Ornamental Cement Tile Factory. The company [192-?]. Oblong octavo publishers decorated cloth (flecked, a small nibble in the back hinge); title page and 100 illustrations, almost all colour, on 52 leaves. Telephone number updated in ink on the front cover. sold

Rare, all and any catalogues from this company are apparently unknown apart from this copy. The company started in 1922 from this South Jeppe address and at some stage became Union Tiles and is still in business. The back of each page has been printed with a tesselated design of the company name and address, all in mirror image reverse. Why?


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>Ota Saburo. 世界一週競争双六 [Sekai Isshu Kyoso Sugoroku]. Tokyo, Kodansha 1926 (Showa 15). Colour printed broadsheet, 54x76cm. On the back is another game printed in brown. Au$325

The New Year gift from the magazine Kingu - a sometimes educational round the world game. Yes, that is a gibbon you see in Australia, well drawn and clearly labelled. Those on the wrong side of the Sydney-Melbourne divide will be pleased to see Melbourne is Australia's major city. Sydney is a lesser town somewhere in Queensland. Those on the other wrong side of the divide will reply that Melbourne is coded green which surely means you don't have to stop there.
Ota Saburo is among the best of the generation of artists who studied oil painting and refused to become a western copyist, instead forging new a Japanese art which saw, starting from around 1900, some of the most remarkable illustrated books you could wish to see. I make no masterpiece claim for this game, it's mere fun.


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>Goto Seikichiro. 和紙と漆 [Washi to Urushi]. Tokyo, Gohachi 1962 (Showa 37). 18x15cm publisher's illustrated wrapper in lacquered textured chitzu and labelled box. 25 double folded leaves including endpapers; handprinted throughout with colour woodcuts - text and illustrations - and eleven mounted samples of lacquer patterned papers.
Edition of 100 copies, signed by the author on the front endpaper. Au$950

A captivating book. Whether or not you care about paper making or modern Japanese woodcuts this is so beautifully printed that you can't help but admire it. Goto produced a few impressive books on handmade Japanese papers; this is the most recondite, hardest to find and the most charming.
*Click on the picture to see a couple more.


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>Catalogue - fire engines. 消防御用喞筒製作所 [Shobo goyo sokuto seisakusho]. 1897 (Meiji 30). Octavo publisher's illustrated wrapper; [12]pp, each illustrated with the 'brass' highlighted (small splodges of brown). A bit smudged, used but rather good. Au$185

A most definitely rare trade catalogue with a dozen hand operated fire engines of varying size and capacity. Printed on quite heavy, decent paper; unlike other such catalogues of the time.


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>Catalogue - blacksmiths' and coachbuilders' supplies. Colton, Palmer & Preston, Ltd. Adelaide. Catalogue. Blacksmiths', Farriers', and Coachbuilders' Tools and Supplies. Adelaide, the company [after 1911]. Quarto publisher's printed wrapper; 49pp, illustrated throughout. Page 49 is on an extra leaf pasted inside the back cover; a couple of corrections pasted over errors here and there. Signs of mild use, a pretty good copy. Au$125

Unfound by Trove.


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Will Andrade, Melbourne & Sydney. Better Magic. A catalogue of tricks ... [Sydney, 193-?]. Octavo publisher's illustrated wrapper; 64pp; illustrated throughout; printed in blue. Au$135

Four additions loosely inserted, ranging from a single leaf list of books to a 16 page list of jokers novelties printed in red.


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NEURATH, Otto. Modern Man in the Making. London, Secker & Warburg 1939. Quarto, excellent in publisher's cloth and dustwrapper (this with a couple of small holes and chips); colour and b/w isotype illustrations throughout. An outstanding copy. Au$1,250

First English edition - or first edition, English issue if you like - of what must be Neurath's most desirable book which, as Lancelot Hogbin said, "combines all that is best in Descartes and the Daily Mirror." So many attempts to help humanity take a great evolutionary step forward vanish without trace but the descendants of Isotype, the universal graphic language created by Neurath, Gerd Arntz et al, have become ubiquitous, telling us when to cross the street and where to piss.


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>MORRELL, J.C. Town Planning. Report to the Honorable the Minister of Public Works. Melbourne, Govt Printer 1915. Foolscap stapled as issued; 82pp, numerous photo illustrations, plans &c numbered to 83 (there are several bis). A fine copy. Au$375

One of the handful of essential early documents of town planning in Australia and scarce. A report from investigations made in England, Scotland and the United States into advances in planning and slum clearances. It is well illustrated with examples of better known and more obscure projects (Kansas City, Denver, Pasadena, Torrance &c), and finally returns to Melbourne, its problems and possible solutions.


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Telegraph. Correspondence Relative to the Establishment of Electro-Telegraphic Communication Between the Australian Colonies. Melbourne, Govt Printers 1856. Foolscap, stitched as issued; 18pp. Loosely inserted is a folding map of the proposed telegraph route between Adelaide and Melbourne and a colour diagram of Siemen's Double Action Morse's Recording Instrument. These are dated January 1857. Au$80

Victoria pioneered the telegraph in the colonies with some local lines in 1854 and 55. Serious discussion between the colonies - recorded here - began in mid 1856 and work on the Adelaide-Melbourne line started in 1857. From there there was no stopping us and here we are with micro-second trade in food futures and instagram.


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>MATTHEWS, Sir William. Melbourne Harbour. Proposed Improvements. Report ... with three drawings. Melbourne, Govt Printer 1910. Foolscap, stapled as issued; [6],29pp and three large coloured plans and elevations. Minor signs of use. Au$150

In 1909 after years of dispute and inaction in the urgent matter of upgrading Melbourne's port, William Davidson, the Inspector General of Public Works, toured British and European harbours fact finding the best modern methods to improve Melbourne. Then, following traditional Australian practice, a titled London engineer was hired to plan a port he had never seen.


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Printing. Photo-Lithography. Report of the Board ... together with evidence ... Melbourne, Govt Printer 1861. Foolscap, stitched as issued; viii,75pp. Au$100

In this, one of the more substantial investigations and descriptions of colonial printing, the new photo-lithographic process of John W. Osborne is examined as a possible replacement of lithography and engraving for maps, plans and similar documents. The consensus is that photo-lithography has some limited uses but for high quality work it doesn't measure up. A number of lithographers, printers, draughtsmen and surveyors give evidence; Thomas Ham seems the most negative of the lithographers. He and others are particularly unhappy about Osborne's claims to originality.


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ROBINSON, P.F. [Peter Frederick]. Rural Architecture, or, a Series of Designs for Ornamental Cottages. Fourth Edition, Greatly Improved. London, Henry G.Bohn, 1836. Quarto publisher's quarter roan and cloth (a bit rubbed round the edges); [14]pp and a leaf of text for each design, extra illustrated title page dated 1837 and 96 litho or engraved plates. Scattered spots, a pretty good copy. Au$350

Twenty designs, some already built, for picturesque cottages, farm houses, almshouses, boat house and dairy, each with plan, elevation and a picturesque view. First published in 1823 and, like most of his books, re-issued in confusing ways. For some reason the second edition of many of his books have almost vanished. Many of the litho plates have been redrawn "at great expense" for this fourth edition.


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RICHARDSON, C.J. [Charles James]. The Englishman's House. A practical guide for selecting or building a house. Third edition. London, Chatto & Windus [1874]. Plump octavo publisher's gilt decorated cloth; 504pp and publisher's list for November 1874; colour frontispiece, numerous line drawings, plans, elevations &c throughout. A bit of spotting at each end, some inoffensive pencil marginalia; in all a pretty good, bright copy. Au$100

Richardson, one of the most English of architects, was hardly revolutionary so his influence, for good or bad, is seen throughout the empire and America. Used copies of this book in varied editions are scattered from the Hebrides to Dunedin - the pencil notes in this remarkably unworn copy trace it to Dunedin in New Zealand - and certainly buildings in Australia came straight out of this book (cf Miles Lewis' article on pattern books in the Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture). F.R.S. Yorke, in his 'The Modern House' (1934), used one of Richardson's houses as example of exactly what modernism wanted gone.


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>BLACK, Archibald et al. American Airport Designs - containing 44 prize winning and other drawings from the Lehigh Airports Competition ... NY, for the Lehigh Portland Cement Company 1930. Quarto publisher's illustrated wrapper (spine chipped at the ends and some wear); 96pp, mostly plates. A name on the front cover, signs of use but a more than decent copy. Au$285

This is, I believe, the first American book on airport architecture, gathering designs submitted to the country's first such competition. The compiler is confident that there are plenty of new ideas never used in Europe and the schemes range from a token crackpot visionary (a circular runway running around the tops of skyscrapers) to beaux-arts, with the bulk falling into classical moderne. Common to all designs chosen for inclusion is a formal layout, with runways, often circular, that range from something like parterre gardens to complex occult symbols; surely evidence that a good beaux-arts education still prevailed. Two designs with some flashy distinction are by Los Angeles and Florida architects, naturally, with film set skyscraper and modernist tower respectively. Both are condemned as unsafe.
Maybe interesting now would be tracking down the entries that didn't make the cut - neither Wright's nor Neutra's made the book.


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>BRADSHAW, Lewis. Modern Mansions. A solution of the housing, the servant, and the drink problems, by a rational, an evolutionary, and a scientific method of housing reform. Kettering, Northamptonshire Printing [1908]. Octavo publisher's illustrated blindstamped cloth (a bit rubbed); 80pp and endpaper advert, six plates (five folding) - plans and elevations. A bit dusty or smudged. Inscribed with the author's compliments. Au$450

Only edition, issued in cloth or wrappers. Bradshaw has seeded sensible British calm through his title - rational, evolutionary, scientific - but this is a radical little book. Bradshaw proposes housing along lines not just co-operative but communal; he goes so far as to use the term "collective". He diverges from the high density urban solutions and the Garden City ideals then dominant among pioneering town planners. Proposed here are short rows of villas or terrace houses - possibly built using Edison's prefabricated concrete system - radiating out from a central amenities hall, these in turn radiating out from a circular town centre of markets and shops. I suspect his killjoy attitude and unforgiving symmetry owe much to James Buckingham but there are some intriguing parallels here with Garnier's schemes - worked out at about the same time but not published for another decade - given we leave out the epic grandeur of Garnier.
A rare book; a search of moderate intensity found three copies in British libraries and one in Canada.


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Town planning. First Progress Report from the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis and in the Populous Centres of the State (sanitation and housing conditions at seaside resorts from Black Rock to Frankston); together with an appendix. Melbourne, Govt Printer 1915. Foolscap, stapled as issued; 34pp. A few diagrams or plans. Au$60

The Commission issued, I believe, three reports and a compendium of evidence between 1915 and 1918. Why they began with seaside resorts may have more to with the weather than anything else. In any case the rash of shanty and tent towns, predatory landlords and municipal apathy meant unsanitary slums all along the shores of Port Phillip.


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>Hokkai Takashima. [Tokuzo Takashima]. 歐洲山水奇勝 [Oshu Sansui Kisho]. Kinkodo 1893 (Meiji 26). 245x180mm publisher's boards with title label (discoloured), bound accordian style; 54 double folded leaves with 48 double page colour woodcuts. A nice copy with the original printed outer wrapper (fukuro) loose inside. Au$950

A fascinating bit of explorative assimilation. Hokkai has produced an album of mountain views gathered in Scotland, France and Italy; unmistakably Japanese wood blocks yet also, somehow, unmistakably western lithographs. The Scottish views are captioned in English, the others in French.
Hokkai was sent by the Ministry of Agriculture to Scotland in 1884 then to Nancy to study forestry. Here, from 1885 to 1888, he became a central member of the Ecole de Nancy and cross pollination becomes personal - in Nancy at least the stamp of Japan on burgeoning tendencies of Art Nouveau is direct and unequivocal, thanks to Hokkai.
Hokkai's fascination with the grandeur of foreign mountains didn't end in Europe. He resigned his directorship of Forestry soon after his return to Japan, in 1889, in favour of art and in 1893 two paintings done in the Rockies were exhibited at the St Louis Exhibition. These showed "all the grace and dexterity of the Japanese handling combined with the true spirit of the American wilds" wrote Maude Oliver in The Studio.


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CARSWELL, John & C.J.F. DOWSETT. Kutahya Tiles and Pottery from the Armenian Cathedral of St. James, Jerusalem. Oxford Univ Press 1972. Two volumes quarto publisher's cloth and dustwrappers; photo plates (some colour), plans and illustrations through the text. I. The Pictorial Tiles & Other Vessels Including a Catalogue of Inscribed and Dated Armenian Pottery ... and an edition of the Armenian Texts with a Translation and Notes. II. A Historical Survey of the Kutahya Industry and A Catalogue of the Decorative Tiles. Au$150


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A triple dose of prejudice and insult

>CRUIKSHANK, George, Henry MAYHEW etc. The Comic Almanack and Diary 1851. [with] ... 1852. [with] ... 1853. London, Bogue 1850-52. Three volumes small octavo together in contemporary quarter gilt calf; long folding handcoloured frontispieces to each volume, etched plates and numerous illustrations. Bound without the extraneous government information and publisher's lists. A pleasing, fresh gathering. Au$300

On purely parochial grounds this is of interest for the first frontispiece: the 'Probable Effects of Over Female Emigration, or, Importing the Fair Sex from the Savage Islands in Consequence of Exporting all our own to Australia!!!!!' In the 1852 Almanack we find 'The Gold in Australia' by Jemmy Bullseye, Professional Burglar of Bottiney Bay and in the 1853 Almanack there is 'An Australian Eclogue', a plate of a cobbler in Australia and a further plate and description of a tragedy caused by female emigration to Australia. The more I look the more important colonial documents these become.
For those with broader views the second frontispiece depicting the craze for bloomers and the third on the effects of female enfranchisement have their chauvinistic appeal.


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ROGERS, Ben. [ie Roger Pugh?]. The Vengeance of the Tong. London, Modern Publishing [193-?]. Octavo publisher's boards and dustwrapper (this a bit frayed frayed with a chip from the spine top). A rather good copy. Au$200

Only edition of this splendid yellow peril thriller. The usual searches find only the British Library copy. Grubby reading copies can be found but once you've seen the cover what's left to read?


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MANSON, Marsden. The Yellow Peril in Action. A possible chapter in history. Privately published, San Francisco, January 2 1907. Octavo publisher's printed wrapper; 32pp (including two blank leaves at the end), folding map. Au$125

A salutary piece of yellow peril literature, this is the history of the war between the USA and China - with help from Japan - in 1910. I can tell you now it didn't end well for America. Manson was the San Francisco City Engineer during the immediate post earthquake years and some of his predilection for technical detail has crept in here. This understandable desire to reinforce polemic with fact is the mark of the amateur and usually the reason why such tales are forgotten but Manson hasn't tried to disguise his aim with fiction; a fair bit is straightforward xenophobic agitprop.
I wonder how much the cataclysm of the San Francisco earthquake and fire had to do with this but I find no direct mention. It's odd that it went to press so soon after the quake - Manson's preface is dated December 1906 - without a word. Did Manson think the shock of the quake was a good prompt for a rocky public to take notice of an even greater threat? Certainly there was a movement to push the Chinese out of central San Francisco as rebuilding began. Was this a misguided bit of timing that guaranteed his book would be ignored?


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>Paper Game. Nancy. Progres Nanceien. Nancy [c1930]. Colour printed broadsheet 50x60cm. Mildly used; with one side, printed with adverts, of its original envelope or wrapper pasted on the back. Au$385

Now here's a city map any fool can follow. With pleasure. If the feet get tired or the shopping gets heavy, there's the taxi number at square 8.


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Homoeopathy. The Medical Telephone: containing hints on the preservation of health. Notes on nursing ... Plain directions for treating diseases. Ambulance lectures ... Hobart, The Homoeopathic Pharmacy 1883. Small octavo publisher's flushcut printed limp cloth; 116pp, a fair amount are advertisements. An excellent copy. Au$200

A neat little book with a neat title. When I first came across a copy of this, many years ago, I wondered whether there were any telephones in Hobart in 1883 but now, with online research, I find that Tasmania embraced the telephone early and 1883 saw telephone exchanges opened in Hobart and Launceston. In fact, according to Tourism Tasmania, Australia's first phone call was a long distance call made in Tasmania two years before Bell got his telephone working. A remarkable bit of neglected history.
This was a rare book for a long time; Ferguson missed it though it fitted his specifications for inclusion and Ford cited three copies, all in Tasmania. Then it became temporarily unscarce when a small cache of copies was discovered some years ago but now it's on its way back up the scarcity scale. Still, there's no need for the moment to buy the greasy, ragged copy that would have once been welcome.


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>New Guinea. Sale of Expropriated Properties (First Group) in the Territories of New Guinea and Papua [with ... Second Group ... Third Group ...]. Melbourne, Custodian of Expropriated Property 1925-26-27. Three volumes octavo, publisher's illustrated boards; numerous photo illustrations throughout, four (of five) folding maps. The general map is not there, the map for the Gazelle Peninsula is in its place. A tropical copy, wrinkled by damp but decent enough, with the signatures of W.R. McGregor, maybe William Roy McGregor, the New Zealand biologist who led collecting expeditions to New Guinea for the museum that now bears his name. A serviceman called R. McGregor was the buyer of one property so the association may be closer to home. I've seen no evidence that Australians were willing to share the spoils with our NZ cousins. Au$1,125

This country for sale. In case you think this a bit strong remember that the economy of Papua New Guinea depended wholly on copra and being sold here are, with few exceptions, the plantations seized from German planters during the war. Peter Cahill borrowed from Pepys the title of his short history of the Expropriation Board - A prodigy of wastefulness, corruption, ignorance and indolence (Journal of Pacific History; v32;1) - and it seems a gentle, too gentle, summation of the venality, as ruthless as it was inept, of the band of thieves rushing to pillage this seeming gold mine.
Until 1925 the Expropriation Board was in the hands of W.H. Lucas, a "xenophobic nonentity" and former manager for Burns Philp, and F.R. Jolley, an accountant who, after his dismissal in 1925, fronted for German firms trying to buy back their properties. W.M. Hughes' promise that New Guinea would be a paradisiacal reward for returned servicemen was a disastrous failure but the favourable terms offered to servicemen proved useful to the three companies that shared the golden goose: Burns Philp, W.R. Carpenter and the Melanesian Company - fronted by Jolley. All three had connections with the others. Servicemen were used as dummies to buy the properties at better rates and those companies were promptly given power of attorney.
Of course protests were made and questions asked in Parliament but a government worried by any threat to their own coffers muttered and shuffled until a few token regulations were introduced in 1927, in time for the last group of properties and long after the best had gone. By 1930, after the failure of the Melanesian Company and many independent planters, Burns Philp owned most everything.
It's about thirty years since I last offered a set of these catalogues for sale. Scarce then, but even so I'm surprised by how few seem to be held in libraries. Trove finds only four libraries with copies of all three and a few more more with one or two. OCLC finds no other set outside Germany. This wasn't some obscure bit of parochial pamphleteering.


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>BALTARD, V. & F. CALLET. Monographie des Halles Centrales de Paris. Paris, Ducher 1872. Large folio half morocco (spine a bit worn, repaired); [4],36pp, 29 engraved plates numbered to 35 (six are double page, one even larger, carrying two numbers), some illustrations through the text. Label of the Franklin Institute inside the front board, no other markings; a very good copy inside. Au$5,000

It's curious that one of the greatest iron and glass buildings (or series of buildings - it was a complex of connected pavilions) ever built was foisted by Napoleon III and Haussmann on the unwilling architect Baltard who was "distressed by the lack of dignity of the materials he was forced to use" (A.L. van Zanten). He much preferred stone. Leaving aside arguments about whether the more revolutionary and thus less successful architect Hector Horeau has been cheated out of due credit, what remains is one of the great modern architecture books of the 19th century and the best record of Les Halles. The introduction is historical and technical and the plates range from a sweeping bird's eye view to the smallest detail.
This is, I believe, a re-issue of the original 1863 sheets with a new title page.


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Selections from 'The Critic' a Manuscript Serial by the St Paul's Literary Association. Sydney, Joseph Cook 1872. Octavo publisher's printed glazed blue wrapper (chipped); 48pp. Used, foxed but decent and acceptable. Au$100

A scarce if minor bit of Sydney literature printed for private circulation, short satires drawn with broad strokes for the most part, by R.H.P., J.S.D., R.L. and a couple of others. Trove finds only the NL copy.


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>Kamishibai. Kijima Takeo. 債券往来 [Saiken Orai]. Kobe, Yokusan Bunka 1943 [Showa 18]. 20 sheets (27x39cm) of card with colour illustrations on one side and text on the other. A small piece from a corner of the last card; signs of use but decent enough. Without a card envelope these usually came in but complete. Au$450

This is a head scratcher. At first glimpse a wartime kamishibai in cartoon form telling the story of the bonds business seems so bizarre that it is irresistable. On second thought it makes sense; selling war bonds was a big deal in every country. On third thought it gets bizarre again. I may be merely uneducated but of all the forms of Japanese graphic art, kamishibai are the most peculiar in that the vast bulk of all that I've seen are godawful. Even given the preponderance of sickening morality and national good in kamishibai stories it is astonishing how few good artists - a particularly versatile bunch in Japan - set their hand to them.
This one is a happy exception. Which is where it gets head scratching again. Produced by the cultural arm of the Yokusan - the press ganged ruling party of wartime Japan - who weren't known for taste, humour or delicacy and who usually produced numbingly awful war propaganda kamishibai ... how did this get through?
Kamishibai are public stories usually told by kamishibai men who set up a folding stand on the back of their bicycles and enacted the dramas illustrated on the cards. Held up with the plates in order, the text for the first picture is on the back of the last. The sheets are transferred to the back as the story continues; the text for the second picture is on the back of the first, and so on.
*Click on the picture to see more.


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Darwin - Cyclone Tracy. Northern Territory News. Emergency Edition. December 26 1974. Darwin 1974. Two pages on a single sheet, 297x240mm. Rumpled, with a bit of white out on one side.
With the first five issues proper of the resurrected News, each four pages, dating from December 31 to January 4; the first headlined, "We're Getting on Top - The News is back". And an accompanying 1998 letter from S. Gardiner of AAG Public relations detailing the history of the emergency issue as provided by Alan Kohler, one of the journalists who made it. Au$1,250

Is this the News' best issue? It's certainly the most succinct and factual. Now, this is what a truly historical document should look like - one rumpled sheet of paper. I've found a few variant accounts of the Emergency Edition, all of which come via Alan Kohler and no record of any actual copies.
The account given in the letter is as good as any: "With Darwin flattened and the NT News unable to publish because of damage to its building and presses, a group of NT News journalists met at a local school. (The Police had urged all residents to congregate at schools so as to centralise distribution of food, clothing and water.) The Police expressed regret that the NT News was unable to publish, and said that Darwin needed some sort of communication to convey key information, and thus help avoid panic in the community. The journalists took to the streets to find some means of printing. A printing shop was located; the front had been damaged and allowed entry. A small printing machine was found at the rear, and with one on each corner, the journalists managed to carry it back to the police station where (with the assistance of police) they put together this emergency edition. After a few copies had been run off, the journalists took them to each school to hand out, also nailing one to a door at each location."
The team credited in the masthead is John Meeking, Neil Naessens, A.D. Ramsay, Dave Johnson, Lorna King and Alan Kohler.


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Exhibition - Dublin 1853. The Irish Industrial Exhibition of 1853 : a detailed catalogue of its contents, with critical dissertations, statistical information, and accounts of manufacturing processes in the different departments; ... Dublin, McGlashan 1854. Large octavo publisher's cloth (rebacked with most of the original spine preserved); xviii,502pp, portait, double page colour litho view of the central hall, double page plan, two elevation plates, four other plates, illustrations through the text. A few flaws to early pages, a couple professionally repaired with tissue, but quite a good copy. Au$950

This also exists with a somewhat different title under the imprint of Sproule; either and both are very uncommon. Sproule is convinced that this Dublin exhibition would be the last of its kind: "the magnitude of the Exhibitions of 1851 and 1853 would have caused a long interval ... before any future attempt could be made; but such attempts the almost faery creation of the Crystal Palace Company at Sydenham have rendered unnecessary" - ie the continuous exhibition of all that was new and excellent would make these monumental exhibitions obsolete. "Considerable attention'"is given to the Exhibition Building for much the same reasons - its temporary nature - thus the captivating colour view of the central hall, even though it added "very materially to the expense of each copy".


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>Photography - Japan. Portraits from photographs scrupulously hand painted to impersonate lithographs. n.p. [c1880-1890?]. Two sheets, 54x41cm and 60x48cm, with nine portraits all but one oval; each about 25cm - ten inches - high. Au$450

Are these the ultimate modern one-up-manship in family portraiture? Painted over photos are common enough and paintings from photos equally so but these are large scale, done from scratch purposely to mimic the grain of lithography. The stippling is so painstaking and exact that it would have been easier to make and print lithographs.
By the 1880's reaction to modernity and the west, by nationalists watching their tradition vanish, was strident and often powerful. Don't forget the western design of the residence of the new Imperial Palace was abandoned after earthquake damage to brickwork and the official carpenter took over. No small victory for superior Japanese traditions. The arguments over portraiture and photography are often unexpected, confusing and contradictory to me. Schools that I would think traditionalist welcomed the camera and realism - though some disliked photo portraits for moral or ethical reasons - but whatever the argument the photograph and its wedded industry - portraits painted in oils over or from photos - became ubiquitous essentials for the family shrine.
Our well to do family is not only on the side of western modernity, they go one step further by embracing the foreign technology of the lithographic print. So why hand painted on such a scale? Maybe partly because that's what a prominent family can afford but likely because portraits like this were still private family affairs. According to Conant (Challenging Past and Present), the painter Takahashi - portraitist of the Emperor - was thwarted in his 1880s project to paint portraits of the heroes of the Meiji by families refusing him use of their photographs.
The smaller set of portraits here is signed and sealed Hokushu. The other, clearly later, has an illegible, to me, seal.
*Click on the picture to see more.


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Catalogue - Fashion. Ribby. Paris. Ribby 1923 - 1924. Paris 1923. Largish octavo printed wrapper (dusty and a bit marked); 16pp, illustrated throughout, the first page colour. A bit used but very decent. Au$80

Smart autumn and winter outfits for men and women, casual and formal.


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Teruha toiletry poster. 白麗水. [Hakuresui or Hakureisui]. A shop poster for Hakuresui toiletry to whiten the skin and remove blemishes. Osaka, Takegaki Shokai c1910. Colour lithograph 53x38cm on quite heavy paper. A small hole and a couple of closed tears in the edges. Framed and glazed in a later but not recent frame (64x49cm). Au$800

Among the myriad images that use race superiority and fear to sell goods - particularly soaps, toiletries and cosmetics - this is the weirdest and most hypnotic that I've ever seen. The weirdness intensifies if you know that the model is Teruha, maybe Japan's most famous geisha and pin-up girl at the end of the Meiji and through the Taisho period. Born Tatsuko Takaoka, in this poster she is about 14 and has possibly graduated from her apprentice name, Chiyoha. Sold by her father at 12, her virginity was soon sold to the president of the Osaka stock exchange and by the time she was 14 she had been engaged to one wealthy business man, promised to another and had a secret affair with an actor. The extended left pinkie finger must be a joke about her misguided sacrifice to love which earnt her yet another name: the Nine Fingered Geisha.
Before and after - or with and without - comparisons were nothing new in Japanese advertising. Neither were celebrities: courtesan prints sold patent medicines long before the Americans arrived and Bismarck adorned adverts for a patent syphilis cure that did for medicine what Bismarck did for Germany. Darkie - coon, nigger, whatever you want to call it - advertising images were obviously not unknown but neither can they have been familiar enough to be taken for granted and reproduced to the American and British formula in the way that the jazz age negro became a standard pattern to be played with by artists and designers in Japan as everywhere else. There is more than hint of a jovial tengu, spirit or minor god here, but for that suit.


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WARD, Arthur. The Miracle of Mapoon or From Native Camp to Christian Village. London, Partridge; Moravian Mission Agency [1908]. Octavo publisher's cloth; 272pp, map and 20 plates. Some browning or spotting but a pretty good copy.
Inscribed by the missionary at nearby Weipa, Laura Schick, to Herbert Wagstaff. Miss Schick does appear in these pages; I don't know about Mr Wagstaff, I got too depressed to read closely. Au$350

Only edition but the first of two or three appearances of the title; there was another Miracle of Mapoon in the twenties, a four page leaflet, and maybe a third in 1960 but I think this last is a muddled catalogue entry. Anyway, Mapoon was of course the Moravian mission on the Gulf of Carpentaria in north Queensland, by the time of this book in its teens.


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DORRINGTON, Albert & A.G. STEPHENS. Our Lady of Darkness. NY, Macaulay 1910. Octavo publisher's cloth; four plates by John Rae. Edges a little dusty, a rather good, bright copy. Au$275

First American edition of this cosmopolitan Australian thriller, published the year before in London as The Lady Calphurnia Royal, without illustrations. Revenge and opium fuel the Lady Calphurnia as she circles the world in a drug induced nightmare attended by her enslaved Chinese dwarf, mute servant girl, the embalmed corpse of her husband, and her fair daughter. Throw in an outback Queensland station, a wrongly convicted prisoner in Noumea that Calphurnia hasn't punished enough, and his fair son and you are well into chapter three.


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>BURICH, Eva, Max Dupain &c. Castlecrag. Castlecrag [1972]. Oblong octavo publisher's illutrated boards; 56pp, map by Marion Griffin and photo illustrations by Max Dupain. Au$200

A privately produced work in aid of the local school with contributions by Gwen Meredith, Bernard Hesling, Betty Roland and others. A fair bit is of course devoted to Walter Burley and Marion Griffin and their plans for an idyllic Griffin community.


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>Takaku Aigai. 靄厓画譜 [Aigai Gafu - cover title; inside: 晚成山房画譜 - Bansei Sanbo Gafu]. Tokyo, Jokichi Okawa 1880 [Meiji 13]. Two volumes 160x96mm, publisher's wrappers with title labels; double page woodcuts in black and grey. A nice pair. Au$550

First edition of this posthumous pocket painter's manual - say that three times fast - by the now celebrated late Edo Nanga painter. Nanga, or Bunjinga, the ultra refined intellectual painting based on Chinese precepts, was antithetic to print making and while some Japanese manuals were produced it was only in the Meiji that such manuals and albums of earlier masters proliferated. I can't find any record that Takaku published anything himself. But then he died quite young, in 1843, and he had no time to take on the hundreds of students his teacher, Buncho, did.
OCLC finds no copies outside the Diet Library; the British Museum has a copy but that's all I can find.


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KEMP, Dixon. Yacht Designing: a treatise on the practical applications of the scientific principles ... illustrated with numerous drawings of celebrated yachts. London, The Field 1876. Folio publisher's cloth (shabby and stained but solid); xii,118pp and advertisements, 40 plates numbered to 34 (with some bis), almost all folding and some quite large, figures through the text. Some expected signs of use and flaws: some spots, some of the folding plates' protruding edge dusty and frayed, a couple of misfoldings, a stain at the edge of the last couple of leaves - still a decent copy of this hefty working book. Au$475

Kemp's first and grandest book.


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ELLIOT, George H. Report of a Tour of Inspection of European Light-House Establishments, made in 1873. Washington, Government Printer 1874. Octavo publisher's cloth (spine ends and tips worn); 288p, 50 wood engraved plates including three coloured charts, 31 illustrations through the text. Au$375

An exhaustive review of the light-houses and associated structures, machinery and technology of England and France; it finishes with an account of the newest technology being displayed at the International Exhibition in Vienna.


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COLE, E.W. Hobbies. Melbourne, Coles Book Arcade [1917?]. Octavo publisher's red gilt 'morocco' (moroccine?); [2],98pp and advertisements, illustrations throughout. Au$100

A special presentation copy with a printed presentation leaf at the beginning, this one not completed but Cole's frontispiece portrait has been signed by him in pencil. A reworking of his 'Hobby Land' with added portraits of the 'great men and women' whose hobbies he enumerates.
Cole got busy in the last year or two of his life, gathering, reworking and adding to earlier works. Some - who knows how many - were issued as these special presentation copies.


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MAUPAS, Ch. [Charles]. & William Aufeild. A French Grammar and Syntaxe, Contayning most Exact and certaine Rules ... of the French Language. Translated into English, with many Additions and Explications, peculiarly usefull to us English ... by W.A. London, printed by B.A. and T.F. for Rich: Mynne 1634. Octavo contemporary calf (labels added and spine sometime repaired at the top, now worn again); [22],445. Signs of use and small flaws - pieces from three margins being the worst; quite a good, fresh copy. Without the extra engraved title as seems common enough. Au$450

Only edition of the English translation? Maupas' original first appeared in 1607 with a second in 1625, a third in 1632 and other printings in between and later. A Latin translation appeared in 1623. "Of paramount importance for the history of the formation of classic French," said Lucy M. Gay in 'Modern Philology' (December 1914) and remarked that she wondered at times while reading it whether there had been any progress in grammar-making since it was published. The finer grammatical arguments the rest of her essay explores somehow escape me.
Like many of the more important French grammars Maupas' work was produced not for the French but for the English aristocracy. This translation might be considered a dumbing down. In his dedication to the Duke of Buckingham Aufeild tells us that Maupas taught the duke's father and his wording suggests that he is angling to be the current duke's teacher.


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John Martin. MONTGOMERY, Robert. The Sacred Annual: being the Messiah, a poem in six books. London, John Turrill 1834. Octavo, bound by Rolwegan; [xvi],300pp; "illuminated" extra title and ten handcoloured mounted lithographs, three by John Martin, others by M'Clise, Etty, Haydon, Franklin &c. Martin's 'The Temptation' bound as the frontispiece as usual; this plate without its printed guard leaf, the rest all present. Some smudges and scattered spots but in all pretty good. A once very smart early Tasmanian binding - straight grain calf or morocco, in the romantic style, by George Rolwegan of Hobart, with his binding ticket - now rebacked with the remnants of the original spine preserved. Au$350

The fourth edition of Montgomery's 'Messiah' but now the only sought after edition - celebrated for the three coloured lithographs by John Martin.


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Mickey Mouse by Walt Disney Book No.1. Sydney, John Sands [c1932]. Square quarto publisher's illustrated card printed in red & black; 48pp, b/w comic strips throughout. A remarkably good copy Au$850

Mickey planted his flag and claimed Australia as a colony of the nascent Disney empire very early but the indigenous industry in Mickey was short lived. The English publishers, as soon as they realised Mickey's potential, exercised their Droit de Seigneur and, until the war made imports impossible, few Disney books were printed here again.


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RICKMAN, Thomas. An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England, from the Conquest to the Reformation: ... sixth edition, with considerable additions ... by John Henry Parker. Oxford &c, John Henry and James Parker 1862. Plump octavo publisher's gilt decorated cloth (spine faded with a couple of small snags at the top): xvi,464pp and publisher's list; 35 plates (a couple with added tint), heaps of illustrations, many full page. Au$100

An uncommonly good copy of the penultimate edition of this 19th century favourite; it first appeared in 1817 and was built up over the decades. The last edition followed some twenty years later.


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JALOVEC, Karel. Encyclopedia of Violin Makers. London, Hamlyn 1968. Two voumes quarto, excellent in publisher's cloth, dustwrappers and card slipcase; 219 illustrations (24 colour). Au$400


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