Maps and Prints

  A rare, very large format official transportation and communications map of China, issued in the wake of The Great Leap Forward (1958-62), Chairman Mao’s monumental programme to rapidly industrialize the country, a vision that involved massive infrastructure projects; published in Beijing by the China Cartographic Publishing House, the state workshop that specialized in producing such high-quality, original thematic maps.

  Very Rare – the first issue of the first large-format printed sea chart of the South Coast of Hainan, based on a reconnaissance survey conducted by John Haldane of the British East India Company, from Sayer & Bennett’s magnificent ‘The East-India Pilot, or Oriental Navigator’.

Adolf HAUPT (fl. 1900 – 1933). Tsingdao [Qingdao]: Printed at the Catholic Mission Press, 1927. 8° (19 x 11.5 cm): [13 pp. advertisements, title, preliminaries], 1-48 pp., [16 pp. advertisements on coloured paper], 49-156 pp. (with 82 photographic images imbedded within text), [2 pp.], plus 2 large folding colour lithographed maps on thick paper, bound in original printed boards with…

  One of the finest general maps of China produced during the fin de siècle period, a large format, highly detailed work produced as part of map sequence for the China Inland Mission (CIM) by the world leading firm of Edward Stanford, and the first issue to be predicated upon the revolutionary cartography of the Russian sinologist Emil Bretschneider, providing…

  This is a superb example of a poster by a Poland-born artist Roman Cieślewicz, representing the SSSR and USA in forms of Supermen, as a mirror image of each-other, self-confidently rushing to save the world. The image was made amidst the Cold War and was published in a smaller scale on the cover of the esteemed French art magazine,…

  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 photograph of the Ibex Mine in Leadville, Colorado, by the local photographer G.B. Sanborn, made around 1900   Albumen silver print 16,5 x 21,5 cm (6.5 x 8.5 inches), originally mounted on grey card 25,5 x 30,5 cm (10 x 12 inches), with stamp of the author verso (margins little scuffed and stained, but overall in a good condition).…

  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…

  A pair of large maps showcasing the Kuban region, as it looked in 1920, made in the United States in 1960 and 1961 by a Cossack émigré, a former Major-General Vyacheslav Naumenko, who escaped the post WWII Repatriation of Cossacks.