Bookfairs

firsts 2021: London's Rare Book Fair

firsts 2021: London's Rare Book Fair

Hordern House is participating in firsts: London's Rare Book Fair, exclusively online 18th-23rd February.

Highlights include: Johann and Georg Forster's pioneer work on the botany of Australia and the South Pacific (pictured); a rare and beautiful lithograph work published by a naval office in provincial France on tattooing in the South Pacific; and the first two years of the Port-Breton journal La Nouvelle France spruiking the horrible fraud of the Marquis de Rays and his supposed paradise colony in New Guinea. 

Stuttgart 2021

Stuttgart 2021

Our catalogue for the Stuttgart Rare Book Fair, online Friday 29th January to Sunday 1st February, includes the first appearance in print of the famous Macrobian world map (see illustration), the most influential of all pre-Renaissance views of the world, including an antipodean, southern continent.

Printed in Brescia, in the first decade of printing there, this strikingly handsome production is the first edition of Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio to print the scientific diagrams and the world map.  

Salon d'Hiver virtuel du SLAM

Salon d'Hiver virtuel du SLAM

Our catalogue for the Salon d'Hiver du SLAM, the Paris Rare Book Fair, online Friday 11th December to Sunday 13th December, includes a beautifully-drawn large manuscript map of Île Bonaparte (modern Réunion)  commissioned in anticipation of the naval actions that would determine possession of the French Indian Ocean Territories during the Napoleonic Wars, original works of voyage art from the Baudin and Freycinet expeditions and the first book with engravings after Redouté. Other highlights include Commander Richard Oliver's only published work, one of the finest Pacific illustrated books of the nineteenth-century.

firsts: London's Rare Book Fair

firsts: London's Rare Book Fair

Our catalogue for firsts, London's Rare Book Fair, online Friday 27th November to Wednesday 2nd December, included the first collected edition of the works of Georg Forster, in completely original condition; the second and best edition of John Harris’ great collection of voyages and travels which includes the important Tasman map; and a splendid printing of the surviving works of Dionysius Halicarnassensis in Greek and roman types.

Other highlights in the catalogue included rare works of natural history by Henry Charles Andrews and Sir William Jackson Hooker each with striking hand-coloured plates, and a fine 16th Century pocket Macrobius in the original pigskin binding.

Amsterdam Rare Book Fair 2020

Amsterdam Rare Book Fair 2020

For the virtual Amsterdam Rare Book Fair we featured the rare complete first edition of one of the finest works on quadrupeds by Johann Elias Ridinger (1768), a classic of zoological illustration with 127 large and beautifully coloured plates; one of the most richly decorated world maps by Henri Chatelain (1719); and an important work on the Spanish in Tahiti by González de Agüeros (1791).

Brooklyn Rare Book Fair 2020

Brooklyn Rare Book Fair 2020

Our  Brooklyn Rare Book Fair catalogue featured the beautiful series of Pacific lithographs by Richard Oliver (the rare coloured issue); maps of Dublin Harbour by an early career William Bligh; and the true first edition of Gulliver's travels, one of the great works of literature, and one with particular interest for Australia.

Melbourne Book Fair 2020

Melbourne Book Fair 2020

Melbourne's 2020 Rare Book Fair had to be exclusively online. We showed a beautifully atmospheric watercolour of the Yarra River in dawn light by Julian Rossi Ashton; the original midshipman's log of a particularly interesting voyage to Australia 1852-54, illustrated with most attractive unpublished drawings including a suite of four charts showing a dated track of the voyage, a fine double-page map of "Port Phillip 1853" with detailed soundings, and a series of sixteen coastal drawings; and the first South Australian illustrated book published, the rare suite of original views by Frederick Nixon.

New York Book Fair 2020

New York Book Fair 2020

For this year's New York Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory we feature 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.