Geography

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…