South America

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

  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).  

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…

  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).