Americas

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

8°. 29-35 pp., facing pages marked with the same number, with colour lithographed plates, printed covers, stapled (tiny loss of paper in the lower corners of the last pages, light staining and foxing, otherwise in a good used condition).

John Luffman’s grand map of Antigua, one of the cartographic monuments of the 18th century British West Indies; predicated upon the goldsmith-cartographer’s reconnaissance of the island conducted when it was still one of the world’s leading sugar-slave economies, as well as hosting a major Royal Navy base (then commanded by the future Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson); the map served as…

  Colour print, folding into original printed paper wrappers (Excellent, clean and crisp with vibrant colours), 75 x 58 cm (30 x 22.8 inches).  

  Very rare – Juan Ondarza’s large and highly detailed wall map of Bolivia, the first proper survey of the republic and one of the great monuments of the 19th Century cartography of Latin America, published by J.H. Colton in New York; at the centre of an entertaining, yet bizarre, story of intrepid Andean surveying, patriotic pride, financial scandal and…

Extremely rare – a large format, separately issued map that is one of the earliest printed masterplans of Brazil’s ‘Novo Distrito Federal’, containing the city of Brasília, which would become Brazil’s capital in 1960; Brasília was an ‘ideal planned city’, designed in the shape of an airplane following the ‘Plano Piloto’, with its main public buildings being Modernist architectural masterpieces;…

Brazil (Eastern – Core Regions) – Rio De Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Pernambuco / The ‘Brazilian Enlightenment’   Karte Von Ostbrasilien. Carte géographique de la partie orientale de l’empire du Brésil, en quatre feuilles, contenant les Provinces maritimes de Pernambuco jusqu’a Rio de Janeiro, celle de Minas Geraës, et une partie des provinces limitrophes, redigée d’apres leurs propres observations…

  Steel engraved playing card, overlaid in coloured stencil, blank on verso (Very Good, minor stainng verso, a small scratch and stain on the front), 97 x 65 mm (3.8 x 2.6 inches).  

  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…

  Steel engraved playing card, overlaid in coloured stencil, blank on verso (Very Good, minor stainng verso, a small scratch and stain on the front), 97 x 65 mm (3.8 x 2.6 inches).  

  Steel engraved playing card, overlaid in coloured stencil, blank on verso (Very Good, minor stainng verso, a small scratch and stain on the front), 97 x 65 mm (3.8 x 2.6 inches).  

The original proposal for the grand Modernist masterplan to redevelop Caracas, conceived at the hight of the Venezuelan Oil Boom, when the city was one of the fastest growing and most economically vibrant urban areas on earth; illustrated by over a dozen sophisticated thematic maps, this preliminary study of the ‘Plano Regulador’, developed by an all-star international team of urban…

  An amazing survivor - a large format working manuscript sea chart of Brazil’s Rio Pará Estuary, leading to the port of Belém, a great trading port of tropical cash crops that was the gateway to the Amazon; the chart was obviously drafted by one of the many British merchant mariners who frequented Belém during the 1820s, during the heady…

  An authoritative composition featuring two maps of Chicago, one centring upon the inner city and the other showcasing the fast-growing suburban areas of the future ‘Chicagoland’, by Rand, McNally & Company, the nationally important Chicago-based map house.   Bi-chrome lithograph (black and green) printed on both sides, folding into original printed tan card wrappers (Very Good, clean, bright and…

  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;…

  Steel engraved playing card, overlaid in coloured stencil, blank on verso (Very Good, minor stainng verso, a small scratch and stain on the front), 97 x 65 mm (3.8 x 2.6 inches).  

  Steel engraved playing card, overlaid in coloured stencil, blank on verso (Very Good, minor stainng verso, a small scratch and stain on the front), 97 x 65 mm (3.8 x 2.6 inches).  

  A beautifully designed art deco map centred on Zagreb, Croatia, made as an advertisement for a competition, organised by a newspaper Jutranji list (Morning Paper), was drafted by a pioneer of the Croatian graphic design Otto Antonini.

A grand format original manuscript that is one of the finest and most detailed maps of St. George’s, the capital of Grenada, from the slave-plantation era, the result of a collaboration between Captain William Elliott, James Langley and James Young of the Royal Engineers; drafted shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, when the Grenada lived under the spectre of a possible…

Very rare - the finest early general gold mining map of ‘The Guianas’ (British Guiana, Dutch Surinam and French Guiana), depicting numerous gold mining concession in the colonies’ incredibly rugged, jungle-covered interiors, resources which prospectors and government officials hoped would yield a ‘bonanza’ that would reverse the economic decline caused by the abolition of slavery; created from the best and…

An exceedingly detailed, very large masterplan of Georgetown, then the capital of British Guiana (today Guyana), amazingly defining every property lot, outlining and labeling every major building, depicting all parks and recreational facilities, and delineating every street and alleyway, being one of the most ‘panoptic’ of all West Indian city maps of its era; created by the Directorate of Overseas…

  Steel engraved playing card, overlaid in coloured stencil, blank on verso (Very Good, minor stainng verso, a small scratch and stain on the front), 97 x 65 mm (3.8 x 2.6 inches).  

A rare and high quality separately issued map of Hispaniola, including the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti) and the Spanish realm of Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic), issued by William Faden, the leading British commercial cartographer, to satiate the intense public interest in the ongoing British Occupation of parts of Saint-Domingue (1793-8), an epic endeavour that was planned to…

  A pair (2) of historically important original manuscript sepia views, depicting 1) the Great House and windmill of Perrins’s Estate, one of Jamaica’s leading sugar plantations, and 2) the St. Dorothy’s (or the ‘Tamarind Tree’) Church, established in 1681, which is today one of the oldest and most culturally significant churches in Jamaica; executed to an unusually high degree…