Africa

administrator or military officer to be employed while making a reconnaissance of the island in the tense period leading up to World War I; featuring 26 colour photolithographed maps and 1 legend sheet all published in Antananarivo by the colonial military press, the ‘Service géographique de l’Etat Major du groupe de l’Afrique Orientale’, including 19 provincial maps and 6 large-format, sophisticated…

  The first edition of the first map of the island of São Tomé to be predicated upon systematic triangulated surveys, by Gago Coutinho, who subsequently became a world famous aviator, published in Lisbon in 1922. 

  A highly attractive separately issued Ottoman map of North-Eastern Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Sudan), also embracing adjacent parts of the Middle East and Southern Europe.

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…

  Lithograph with original colour: 18 x 23 cm (7 x 9 inches) (soft fold, slightly age-toned and stained).

A very rare, large format, separately issued map of Africa that is perhaps the last great map of the continent to be printed in Ottoman Turkish script, with attractive colours and adorned with the flags of major African states and colonies, published in Istanbul for the Kitabhane-yi Sudi bookshop.   Colour off-set print (Good, some light staining, wear and some…

  Colour lithograph, folding into original printed card covers bearing title and view on front cover and a map of the Léopoldville area on back cover (Excellent condition, Map amazingly clean, bright and crisp, seemingly barely ever opened, only the lightest marginal wear to covers), 86 x 68.5 cm (34 x 27 inches).   A very rare and early cartographic…

A trio of very large format diagrams (2 blueprint maps, 1 line chart) made for the Companhia de Petróleo de Angola in the 1920s, when it was prospecting the Cuanza (Kwanza) Basin, one of Africa’s great petroleum deposits; the works were drafted by James J. McGowan, a larger-than-life Irish-American engineer who later became a pillar of Luanda’s business community; the…

  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 collection of 10 maps of the Cabo Verde Archipelago, being 9 individual island maps produced between 1922 and 1930 by the special mapping team, the Missão Geográfica de Cabo Verde, being the first maps of the islands predicated upon complete systematic trigonometric surveys; plus, a 1960 official general map of the archipelago featuring extensive manuscript additions of air and…

  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…

A map from Umûm Vilayât-ı Şâhâneyi Hâvi Küçük Atlas - Umûmî Küçük Atlas (General Small Atlas)   Chromolithograph. 9 x 13,5 cm (3.5 x 5.3 inches).

  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…

  Extremely rare – possibly a unique survivor - a stellar large format blueprint edition of a military survey of Ismailia, Egypt, the planned city that was long the headquarters of the Suez Canal Company, made by the British Royal Engineers during the tense period between World War II (when the canal was the ultimate strategic objective of the Nazi…

  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…

This is the extremely rare first edition of the Italian Navy’s sea chart of stretch of the Somali coast around El Ataleh, some ways up from Mogadishu.          Zincograph (Good, but with noticeable wear along old folds with some toning in upper area), 63 x 59 cm (25 x 23 inches).  

  A German map shows Abyssinia on the eve of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, in 1935.