Catalogues & Lists
Captain James Cook 250 years on
As it is the 250th anniversary of the voyage of His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour into Australian and New Zealand waters we celebrate with this catalogue the achievements of Captain James Cook and his crew.
Much has been discussed about the impact of the English exploring expeditions in the early colonial period. We acknowledge that whatever may have been the eventual impact of these visits to Australia and New Zealand and throughout the wider Pacific, when colonisation came to replace discovery, nothing diminishes the importance of the maritime achievements of Cook and his crew. This is particularly the case in the scientific areas of astronomy, navigation, cartography and the natural sciences, as well as the first meetings with indigenous peoples, more often in Cook’s case in friendship than in hostility.
Please click on any link to see more information and images on our Hordern House website.
Navigating Cook
We invite you to enjoy this catalogue, part of a new collaborative exhibition between Hordern House and leading art dealers Michael Reid. The exhibition will be running in Sydney until May 23rd. Michael Reid will be exhibiting works by 15 significant artists who have charted the nations changing attitudes to the cause and effects of the navigator Captain James Cook's first contact in Australia and New Zealand. In this catalogue, and alongside this modern examination, Hordern House is exhibiting original antiquarian material including maps, books and pictures.
Books with stories
A list of books which each "tell a story" beyond authorship: whether by publisher, owner, association or historical context.
Meditations on the history of the book
'Whatever they may do, authors do not write books. Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and other engineers, and by printing presses and other machines.'
So observed Roger Stoddard, the eminent book historian and former curator of Rare Books at Harvard, which is the starting point for a meditation on the history of the book by our colleague Anthony Payne, Hordern House's consultant in Europe. We are delighted to share it with you. Anthony's ongoing research project is a bibliographical study of the various travel books and other writings of Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616), and has been awarded a PhD for the first instalment of this.
Corsali to Cook
A curated list of voyage books relating to the mapping and exploration of our world from the early period up until the late Enlightenment. A full description of the rare library globes pictured may be found here
Andrea Corsali & the Southern Cross
In 1515 Andrea Corsali, an Italian under the patronage of the Medici family, accompanied a Portuguese voyage down the African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope, en route to Cochin, India. On his return Corsali's letter to his patron describing the voyage was published. It included the earliest illustration of the stars of the Crux, the group of stars known today as the Southern Cross. The context of his remarkable discovery is explored here in an essay by Anne McCormick, prepared as a continuation of her study "The Book in the Renaissance" at the London Rare Book School, University of London, 2019.
New York Book Fair 2020
Our catalogue for the New York Book Fair March 5-8 at the Park Avenue Armory features:
Voyage de Découvertes aux Terres Australes...
The great French voyage of the Napoleonic period, the ambitious voyage to the "terres Australes" or southern continent under Baudin, chronicled by its participants Louis de Freycinet (later to command his own voyage) and the scientist François Péron, and published in six separate volumes over a period of ten years. The Baudin voyage has been characterised as the last great Enlightenment voyage, and was perhaps its purest expression, combining as it did scientific curiosity and research, territorial and geo-political ambition, and the spirit of enquiry on the widest scale;
An exceptional artefact from Captain Cook's three voyages
A Catalogue of the Different Specimens of Cloth collected in the three voyages of Captain Cook...by Alexander Shaw (1787) has long been regarded as one of the rarest and most desirable of all Pacific voyage books, in which the printed text is slender compared with its large cloth specimens: samples of indigenous tapa cloth collected by Cook's men, at times of first or very early contact with native peoples; Tahiti and the Hawaiian islands are amply represented. To view the illustrated flipbook click here.
Représentations des animaux...(1768)
Rare complete first edition of Johann Ridinger's great series of quadrupeds, in the original German with French translation. This is a classic of zoological illustration, its 127 large and beautifully coloured plates showing wild and domestic quadrupeds, with a few of the plates depicting two or more animals, sometimes from different species.