Geography

  8°, 29 pp., later marbled wrappers (slightly stained, otherwise in a good condition).  

An extremely rare Nazi report on the state of roads in Germany's former African colonies and the Belgian Congo, made early in World Wat II in preparation for plans for the Third Reich to regain its African empire either by diplomacy or force, being a printed copy of an original typescript labelled as 'Als Manuskript gedruckt' ('Printed as a manuscript'), issued…

  A rare, richly illustrated book in Ottoman script on Africa, North Pole, Australia and South America.

  A scarce, pioneering atlas of Africa with 18 colour plates featuring 50 maps designed by the leading Vienna map house of Freytag & Berndt, including some sophisticated works of thematic cartography and original maps showcasing the level of Western knowledge of the continent, made to capitalize upon the Africa-mania that swept the general public in the wake of the…

  A rare ephemeral Ottoman map of Africa was printed on the back cover of a notebook   8°. [48 pp.] manuscript in pencil on paper with printed stripes, stapled, original pink illustrated wrappers (front cover with light water-staining, tears, loss of image and recently repaired with scotch tape, map with soft folds and tiny tears in the margins, staples…

A complete set of the contemporary Ottoman translations of Schweinfurth’s influential travelogue to Africa. 8°: 911 pp. with black and white illustrations, folding map, coloured in outline, one toned lithograph with hand coloured details, contemporary Ottoman black calf with gilt and debossed decoration (remboîtage in a contemporary Ottoman binding) (minor age-toning and foxing, holes in the map on the crossings…

A foundational document of the establishment of the Estado Novo’s transformative colonial regime in Angola, being the secret typescript report on the state of the Portuguese colony written (and signed in mss.) by the military strongman and political heavyweight António Lopes Mateus, who had just been appointed as the Governor-General of Angola, submitted to the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar; in…

Very Rare – a remarkably astute treatise on cholera accompanied by an amazing 462 case studies of named patients written at the height of the Cholera Epidemic of 1833-4 in Portugal by the respected physician Emigdio Manoel da Victorio da Costa, who selflessly tended to infected persons on the front lines; the work remained in manuscript for many years, until…

  Official Note from the Consul Charged ad Interim of the General Consulate of France in Buenos-Aires, to the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Argentine Confederation, reclaiming on the authority of international law, that the French, who notoriously and publicly have established themselves in the republic with the same enjoyments and civil liberties as the Argentine citizens, be not…

An elaborately made manuscript travelogue to Argentina in 1891 by a teenage boy Mariano de Bary, a son of a bank and transportation mogul Heinrich Albert de Bary and a descendant of a prominent Argentinian family Saavedra.   Large 4º, blank, illustrated title page, 130 pp., [1 pp.], manuscript in blue ink, 43 original black and white photographs mounted in…

  A very rare atlas made by the Berlin Missionary Society, one of the most important missionary organizations in Africa and China during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, featuring 16 original maps made by missionary cartographers, including important figures such as Alexander Merensky and Bernhard Struck, containing 14 maps of South and East Africa and 2 maps of China;…

  A fascinating, foundational work on the Brazil’s wild southern frontier during the generation following independence, being an account of Rio Grande do Sul written by Nicolào Dreys, a French merchant who lived in the province from 1818 to 1828, and published in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 during the height of the ‘Ragamuffin War’, a successionist struggle which gripped…

  A highly important and attractive work on the Eighth Xhosa War (1850-3), a critical conflict in which the British scored a crushing defeat upon the Xhosa, so securing permanent dominance over the Eastern Frontier regions of the Cape Colony, a victory secured by the ‘scorched earth’ offensive launched by Governor George Cathcart from the spring of 1852 to the…

[From the Travel through America. The City of Chicago]   An Ottoman translation of Baron Edmond de Mandat-Grancey’s description of Chicago, first published in 1898   8°, 37 pp., later marbled wrappers (slightly stained, otherwise in a good condition).

  A fine example of an important and beautifully produced national atlas of chile, featuring 39 maps predicated upon the best scientific sources, made by Enrique Espinoza, who is credited with revolutionizing the study of geography in Chile, published by the venerable Paris firm of Erhard Frères.   Small 4° (27 x 20.5 cm): 2 pp., 39 maps (5 folding;…

[Tercüme-i Tarih-i Nevâdir-i Çin-i Maçin / Translation of the Stories of History of China and the Greater China]   8°, 70 pp. lithograph, first two pages with gilt margins, later blue cloth boards with brown cloth spine, grey printed endpapers (minor staining overall in a good condition).  

Adolf HAUPT (fl. 1900 – 1933). Tsingdao [Qingdao]: Printed at the Catholic Mission Press, 1927. 8° (19 x 11.5 cm): [13 pp. advertisements, title, preliminaries], 1-48 pp., [16 pp. advertisements on coloured paper], 49-156 pp. (with 82 photographic images imbedded within text), [2 pp.], plus 2 large folding colour lithographed maps on thick paper, bound in original printed boards with…

  A stellar moment of African cartography and inland hydrography, being the first atlas, or accurate, complete large-scale map, of the 1,724 km-long navigable route of the Upper Congo River from Léopoldville (Kinshasa) to Stanleyville, the only natural passage into the heart of Africa, made during World War I for the use of steamer captains by the specialist Belgian colonial…

  8°, 96 pp., advertisement, original illustrated wrappers (slightly stained, a tiny loss of image on the rear wrappers, but otherwise in a good condition).  

  A travelogue to the Holy Land through Egypt by a Croatian professor Krsto Krile, published on the eve of WWI.   8°, XI, 231 pp., interleaved photographs, two folding plates, and three folding maps (Jerusalem, Croatia, the Holy Land), original boards with decoration and lettering, original cloth spine with lettering (hardly noticeable foxing, very light wear to the corners,…

Very Rare – the first broadly accurate and detailed map of the course of the lower Danube River, that flowed 1,400 km from Belgrade to the Black Sea; a colossal 7-sheet work (bound in atlas form) that would measure a course approximately 420 cm (almost 14 feet!) long if joined, based on the first serious attempt to map this vital…

  8°, 184 pp. with black and white illustrations, original illustrated wrappers, later spine (small tears in margins, small patches with loss of text due to glue on three pages replaced with manuscript in pencil, otherwise in a good condition).  

  A very rare and important Arabic language school atlas of Egypt, commissioned by the country’s Education Ministry and Ministry of Finance, emblematic of the country’s emerging national awakening whereby Egyptians gradually regained control over their country’s economy and institutions from the British quasi-colonial regime; in this vein, such cartographic works in the Arabic language, made for the use of…

  A manuscript travelogue of Europe with stunning illustrations, made by a female author   Oblong 8°. [5 pp.] blank, [16 pp.] manuscript in black ink with illustrations in gouache, pencil and pencil, accompanied with yellow highlights and toning, illustrated titles and initials, yellow endpapers, [15 pp.] blank, dark green washed silk binding with gold tooling and lettering, gilt edges…

  [Primary Atlas of the World. For use in Egyptian Schools. First Edition]   First Egyptian modern school atlas of the world, published in the year of the country’s independence, in 1922.   Square 4°. Title page, 35 pp. with full page colour lithographed maps, bound in original blue card covers with title printed on front cover (title page little…

Pierre Nicolas Langlet Du Fresnoy. Avignon: Chambeau 1782.   12°, viii, 116 pp., folding map of the world (old Catholic school stamp on the title page, small cracks in the hinges of endpapers, otherwise in a good condition with minor staining, binding little scuffed and rubbed).

  A rare Greek manual on quick and precise map-making on the field with limited equipment.   8°,77 pp. with black and white illustrations, original illustrated wrappers, stapled(printed on thin paper with traces of printed text on reverse side, small tears in margins, wrappers slightly stained, with tiny loss of paper in margins, but overall in a good condition).  

An extremely rare early issue of Charles Kennedy Jardine’s directory and almanac for British Guiana, an unusually comprehensive work of its kind, featuring a vast wealth of information available nowhere else, a critical resource for the study of the colony during this critical period, compiled and published in Georgetown by the ‘Daily Chronicle’ newspaper.   8° (16.5 x 10.5 cm):…

A highly important work on early petroleum history, being the official account of the first scientific geological reconnaissance of Northern Iraq, featuring 10 large, colourful maps that are the first detailed, accurate geological maps of the same region, a work that served as the blueprint for the Turkish Petroleum Company to discover the world’s largest oil field near Kirkuk in…

Fahreddin Reşad Bey (Rumbeyoğlu Fahreddin Bey also Rumbeyoğlu Fahr al-Din Bey,1867–1943) - Mehmed Nâbi Bey (1868-1924). [The Problem of Irrigation and Water Supply in Mesopotamia] Istanbul: Matbaa-i Âmire 1334 [1918]. 8°, 14 pp., [2 pp.] blank, original tan wrappers with lettering on the cover (minor foxing, otherwise in a good, clean condition) (#70726). An Ottoman pamphlet on the irrigation in…

  Japan. Past. Present. Future   The first Ottoman book on Japan.   8°. [2 pp.] index on pink paper, 131 pp., double-page colour map, folding map, later wrappers (folding map with partly repaired tears, otherwise in a good condition).    

  A rare collection of two titles that feature entertaining and valuable accounts of early frontier life in Patagonia, the result of separate investigative tours of the Río Negro and Chubut territories by the brothers Moritz and Theodor Alemann, prominent journalists, who endeavored to assess the regions’ suitability for Germanic immigration and to weave German immigrant ‘colonies’ in Argentina into…

  Extremely rare – no other examples recorded – the first edition of Reverend Buckley Wood’s history of Lagos, one of the seminal sources on the city’s precolonial period, printed in Exeter in 1878.

  A charming pocket atlas in Ottoman language, made in the first years of the Republic of Turkey.   Long small 8°: [4 pp.], 24 pp., 120 pp., 34 colour lithographed maps and charts, some folding (complete – matching the list in text), contemporary half linen binding, debossed dark faux leather boards (minor staining, mostly on the edges, front endpapers…

Mehmet Ziya GÖKALP (1876 – 1924). [Konya Seyahati Hâtırâtından / Memories from Travel to Konya] Istanbul: Araks Matbaası 1328 [1912]. 8°, 39 pp. lithography in gold, illustrated pink wrappers, unbound as originally published (wrappers slightly dusty and stained with small tears in margins, internally with tiny worm holes in inner margins, margins little dusty with tiny tears) (#70621). A description…

  Very rare – a great monument of Arctic exploration and cartography, being a colossal 19-sheet map (or atlas) that represents the first systematic scientific and broadly complete mapping of North Greenland, charting a 1,200 km-long arc from Cape York, in the southwest to Danmark Fjord, in the northeast, conducted by the ‘Danish Bicentenary Jubilee Expedition (1921-3)’ led by Lauge…

A scarce Japanese Meiji era atlas, based on Johnston’s The National Atlas of Historical, Commercial and Political Geography   4°, [1 pp.] text in red with gold decorative margins, 7 double-page colour lithographed maps, 23 pp. with imprint on the inner side of the rear pasted endpaper, original card wrappers with lettering, black cloth spine (sporadic minor foxing, world map…

  A very rare and attractive Mexican manual for instructing light infantry in the field, published shortly after Mexican Independence, with 2 charmingly crudely engraved plates depicting suggested reconnaissance formations, published in Mexico City for the Ministerio de Guerra y Marina. 12° (14.5 x 10 cm): [2], 251 pp., plus, 2 folding engraved plates (with Fig. 1 measuring 15 x…

8°, 34 pp., [2 pp.] blank, later marbled wrappers (slightly stained, otherwise in a good condition).

  Very rare in commerce – the authoritative firsthand account of the first European attempt to colonize New Guinea, written by Lieutenant Justin Modera of the expedition ship ‘Triton’, who recounts the harrowing attempt to establish Fort Du Bus and to explore the forbidding southwestern coast of New Guinea, featuring a stellar sea chart of the region from Modera’s groundbreaking…

  An impressive archive consisting of a stellar original photograph and sixteen manuscript documents relating to the Comte d’Escayrac’s 1856 planned expedition to find the source of the White Nile, two years before John Hanning Speke successfully accomplished said objective, from the personal papers of Gabriel Aubaret, the mission’s second-in-command and subsequently a famous diplomat and a leading figure in…

[İlk ve Orta Mekteblere Mahsus Coğrafya Atlası / Geographical Atlas for Primary and Middle Schools] Istanbul: A. M. Karmi, Publisher - Leipzig: Wagner & Debes, Printer [1922]. 4°, [2 pp.] lithographed title page and index verso, 24 pp. chromolithographed maps, original green card binding with lettering and green cloth spine (good used condition with minor foxing and minor chips in…

  [Mükemmel ve Mufassal Co‎ğrafya-yı Umumi Atlası /  Complete and Detailed General Geographical Atlas]   8°, [8 pp.], 188 pp.,, [4 pp.], interleaved page between p. 28-29, 37 colour lithographed double paged maps (complete) including one plate with two maps and one folding map, original blue binding with debossed lettering and decoration (sporadic old annotations in Ottoman, one map (Asia)…

  [Usûl-i Coğrafya-yı Sagir / Small Introduction to Geography]   An early Ottoman geography book with large, wonderfully originally coloured maps.   12°: 156 pp., [4 pp.] blank and errata, 3 folding plates with maps – lithographs with original colour, original green boards and green cloth spine (binding with small chips and scratches, inside in a good condition with minor…

A unique pair of an Ottoman manuscript atlas and a map, made by a student of the Military Highschool in Bitola, in 1891, as a project for his final exams.

  An early modern Ottoman geography school book   Small 8°, 54 pp., [2 pp.] blank, 7 colour printed double-page maps, contemporary marbled paper boards and black cloth spine (binding restored with partly repaired loss of paper, tiny holes in the folds and tiny tears in margins, minor staining, but overall in a good condition).    

  [Coğrafya-yı Tabiî İlmine Esas-ı Muhtasar / Physical Goegraphy. The Fundamentals].   A highly sophisticated Ottoman geography education book illustrated with 9 resplendently coloured plates of thematic World Maps, as well as dozens of monochrome diagrams and maps within the text; the work sponsored by American Protestant missionaries for use in their schools throughout Turkey and the Levant, issued in…

A unique Ottoman manuscript atlas created by a geography teacher at the Preparatory School in Bolu to address the lack of modern printed materials for geography classes. 8º. Manuscript. [14 pp.] text, 99 single- and double-page numbered maps, but actually 101 maps with nos. 10 and 11 marked twice, all maps with contemporary coloured details and verso blank, interleaved blank…

  [Memâlik-i Osmaniye Cep Atlası / The Pocket Atlas of the Ottoman Empire]   12°: 6 pp., [2 pp.], 328 pp. text in Ottoman, 64 pp. with single- or double-page maps, lithographed in colour, original dark red cloth binding with black and gold lettering and decoration- (light foxing and staining, last page age-toned, front end-papers replaced, binding slightly rubbed, but…

[Fenn-i Coğrafya İçin Yazısız Harita Defteri. Harita Tersimi Usûlünün Mebâdisi / Blank Map Book for Science of Geography. The Basics of the Map Representation Method] آفريقا [Arika / Africa]   Ottoman filled-in blank atlas of Afrika with unique and exquisite original colour   8°. 22-28 pp. facing pages marked with same numbers [altogether 16 pp.] with hand coloured lithographed maps…

ANON. [Palestine Drawn in Historical-Geographical-Statistical Outlines Based on Older and Modern Travel Descriptions. Along with a Map of the Holy Land] Karlsruhe – Freiburg: Herder 1830. Large 8°. Engraved frontispiece, showcasing the map and interior of the Holy Grave, [4 pp.] title and index, 148 pp., folding lithographed map, coloured in outline, contemporary marbled board and brown goat spine with…

    An unusual illustrated publication on the Polish expedition to Harbin, China, which founded the city in 1898, and the Polish community in the region in the beginning of the 20th century. 8°. X, 222 with interleaved black and white images, original yellow wrappers with illustrated cover (wrappers sightly worn and dusty, but overall in a good condition).  

  Rare – one of the seminal works on early 20th century Macau, being an anthology of articles by Henrique Travassos Valdez, the liberal republican firebrand who was the incumbent Portuguese national senator for Macau, with brilliant yet controversial analyses of Macau’s place within the Portuguese Empire, its heated relations with China, its vital port and economic development, as well…

Book on the geography of Portugal, richly illustrated with de Cantos’s unusually designed maps and drawings.   Small 8°, 138 pp. with colour illustrations, 2 mounted illustrations on brown paper, pink wrappers with flaps and hand-coloured illustration on the cover (three owner’s signatures on the first page and one on the top of the cover, small paper label on the…

  An apparently unrecorded guidebook to Florida, issued around 1902 by the Seaboard Air Line Railway, a critically important driver of the development of Central Florida, including of Tampa Bay and Orlando, written by John W. White, the railway’s General Industrial Agent, the work is copiously illustrated with 25 photographic images and features a custom edition of the large format colour…

A rare travelogue from Istanbul to North America and the Caribbean, written in French by P. G. Foscolo from a family of shipowners. Printed in Istanbul.

A very rare Austro-Hungarian pilot for the Red Sea, illustrated by 4 colour lithographed sea charts, being the first separate printing of Captain Wilhelm Kropp’s observations and mapping of that critical maritime space, created in the wake of the opening of the Suez Canal, published in Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia) in the Italian language for the benefit of Istrian and…

  A rare pioneering Ottoman work on the history of Rhodes before the Muslim Ottoman rule. Printed in Rhodes.   8°, 160 pp. with black and white illustrations, [1] full page black and white map, later black cloth binding with debossed ornaments and gilt lettering (tiny tears in margins, softs fold, map with small loss of paper in the margins,…

  One of the most important, engaging and authentic accounts of Rio de Janeiro at an exciting historical juncture, in the immediate wake of the onset of the ‘Brazilian Enlightenment’ the country’s independence; written by Ernst Ebel, a wealthy Baltic-German merchant from Riga (then in the Russian Empire), who traveled to Rio to investigate the prospects of Russo-Brazilian trade; Ebel’s…

A fine example of the first edition of the first printed atlas of the Cape Verde Islands (Cabo Verde), the then Portuguese archipelago off the coast of West Africa, featuring 11 large, attractive, custom drafted maps, including one for each of the major islands, along with detailed textual descriptions, by Christiano José de Senna Barcellos, a Portuguese naval officer and…

  French Colonization of Tunisia Trade with Central Africa Algiers Imprint   [Society of Physical, Natural and Climatological Sciences of Algiers. 19th meeting of Members of Scientific Society at the Sorbonne. Algeria, Tunisia and Central Africa. Creation of a Regular Caravan Service Between Djerba and Central Africa].   A rare pamphlet in French language, printed in Algiers and published in…

  Rare – an issue of the Afrikaans-language almanac issued by the government of the South African Republic (ZAR); featuring a vast wealth of information on the Afrikaner society during the greatest gold rush in world history and upon the eve of the Second Anglo-Boer War; evidently a special hardcover example bearing the stamp of the chief state printer. 

  An extremely rare early Bloemfontein imprint featuring seminal primary sources concerning the end of the Orange Free State-Basotho Wars which secured the Anglo-Afrikaner balance of power in the region, as well as the security of what would become Lesotho, commissioned by the Volksraad of the Orange Free State as a work of ‘intellectual propaganda’ advancing its national claims. 

  A fascinating account of the German economist and ethnographer Karl Theodor Stöpel’s tour of Taiwan which occurred just after the island was taken over by Japan, during which he witnessed the island rapid’s economic-political transition and the local Chinese’s rebellion against the new regime, as well as being one of the earliest scientific missions deep into the island’s interior,…

  [Geographical Atlas for Primary Schools. Slovenian Edition]   A rare official atlas for primary schools, issued in Slovenian language by the Fascist Italy, after its taking over the central Slovenian region in World War II in 1941.   Small 8°. 20 pp. with colour maps and black and white photographs, original wrappers with lettering (good used condition with old…

Gu HONGMING (also Ku Hung-Ming, 辜鴻銘, 1857-1928). Beijing: The Peking Daily News, 1915. 8 º , [8 pp.] blank and titles in Chinese and English, 21 pp., [3 pp.] blank and index, X, 168 pp., original green binding (binding little water-stained and rubbed, internally clean with sporadic annotations in pen and pencil). The first edition of a collection of essays…

A great monument of thematic cartography, being an atlas of world maps that depict geomagnetic declination and inclination throughout the globe as it varied at different historical times, created by the eminent Norwegian physicist and astronomer Christopher Hansteen, its 15 maps, printed on 7 plates, are largely predicated upon the author’s own meticulous data collection methods and analytical skills which…

  [Seyahat Jurnali. İstanbul'dan Bağdat'a ve Hindistan'a. Sene 1300 ila 1304 / Travelogue. From Istanbul to Baghdad and Istanbul. From 1883-1887].   8°, 119 pp. with 12 interleaved black and white plates and one double-page plate, original yellow cloth boards with gilt and black lettering and decoration, later calf spine with gilt lettering, later marbled endpapers (minor foxing, endpapers slightly…

  8°, [2 pp.], 84 pp., interleaved 15 plates, original covers mounted on modern cloth binding, modern pink endpapers (minor foxing, small holes in inner white margin from old binding with a string, some plates loose, original covers slightly rubbed on the corners, tiny folds in corners, but overall in a good condition).  

  12°, 118 pp., [² pp.] blank, original blue wrappers with lettering, later spine (minor foxing to the wrappers, otherwise in a good condition).  

  A rare Italian report on the travel through the North of Libya by a German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs, written by a lawyer Rizzardo Rizzetto, who in his researches emphasized the importance of Tripolitania for the Italian exploration of Africa, shows an early Italian tendency to colonize the region.   8°. [10 pp.], 125 pp., [3 pp.], original blue wrappers…

8°. 60 pp. with a map, [4 pp.], original wrappers with lettering, later spine (minor staining and foxing, but overall in a good condition).

  A handsome clean example of an exceedingly rare first Ottoman lithographed atlas, made by a pioneer of the Ottoman modern mapmaking, Ali Şeref Paşa in the time of his schooling in Paris. Ali later became the leading Ottoman governmental cartographer and is today known for his last, unfortunately unfinished gargantuan project of wall map of Anatolia in 100 sheets,…

A unique and vital primary source on the history of what is today the United States Virgin Islands during the critical period of the Napoleonic Wars and the twilight of the West Indies sugar-slave economy, being the original manuscript letter book of William Manning, an English MP, tycoon, slave plantation owner and the Governor of the Bank of England, who…

  A very rare, large-format atlas of the sea floor off the western and northwestern coasts of Africa, from Morocco down to Sierra Leone, made by the German Navy during the height of World War II expressly for the use of U-Boats; with 24 plates of highly sophisticated and brightly coloured sea charts predicated upon novel, recent intelligence, it was…

  [Ukrayna, Rusya ve Türkiye. Makaleler Mecmuası / Russia, Ukraine and Turkey. A Discussion]   A pamphlet on cultural and demographic connections between Ukraine and Turkey, printed in Ottoman, in Istanbul, during World War I   8°. 71 pp., folding map, later brown cloth binding with gilt lettering (light staining and foxing, small tears in the inner margin of the…

  [Report on Yemen. A Statement about the Improvement of the Situation in Yemen, Presented to the Ottoman Parliament by deputy Nureddin Bey from Siverek]   8°, 48 pp., folding colour map, later brown cloth binding with mounted original wrappers (wrappers slightly age-toned and stained with tiny pieces of paper missing, inside in overall good condition).