Africa

  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.