Charles Noury (1809-1869), a French naval officer born in Nantes, spent a number of years on service in the Pacific where he was entranced by the Marquesas islands. Years later, in his retirement, he studied and shared his collection of Pacific and especially Marquesan artefacts, and his Album Polynésien, an extremely rare and beautiful illustrated description of these and of observations that he made there, was published in Nantes in 1861. Among the wonderful depictions...

We do as much as we can in-house, including all our own photography for catalogues. Our warehouse premises are much more convenient for this than our old colonial bulding in Potts Point was -- that wasn't nearly as tech-friendly. Here is the western end of the long space we use where we can keep a studio setup for weeks at a time.

We have an unusually interesting copy of the First Fleeter Watkin Tench’s second book, “A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales” 1793, from the inventory of an 18th-century book club in Stockton-on-Tees in the N.E. of England, at that time transitioning from being a small quiet market town to an industrial hub with growing engineering and shipbuilding activities. See details of this copy and of the readers noted in...

Macao street scene, 1844: the thirty-year-old architect Edward Ashworth, on his way back to England from Auckland and Sydney, was an early visitor to Macao during its first period of rapid development in the mid-1840s. His depiction of a Chinese street scene, concentrating on details of the architecture, was published in his essay 'Chinese Architecture' (1851 & 1853).  We recently rediscovered the detailed original drawing for this important image -- details here.  

Jacques Arago, artist on board Freycinet’s Uranie during the French circumnavigation of 1817-20, drew this intimate portrait of brother Ciriaco, the curé in Agana, the capital of Guam, during the visit there of the Uranie expedition between March and June 1819. He titled it  “M le curé d’Agana en petit negligé”. It’s a witty and charming portrait of a figure who likely expected to be taken more seriously: the cleric is shown in his “at...

“A favourite dog of Lord Bessborough’s, which had lived in the family for many years, was observed to have no teats, and never to have been in heat, although, to appearance, a perfectly formed bitch in all other respects: those circumstances being made known to Sir Joseph Banks, he requested, that when the animal died, it be sent to him…”. So Everard Home tells the story in his “An Account of the Dissection of an...