Maps and Prints

  A rare, seemingly unrecorded tobacco atlas of Bulgarian regions was made on the eve of WWII, in 1940, in Plovdiv. Some manuscript annotations were added up to 1944.

  A stunning example of a rare, separately issued map of Burgundy by Gerard de Jode, was coloured in the late 16th century in the style of the frescoes of the Gallery of Maps in Vatican.

  A fascinating, very rare large-format map of Burma and Northeastern India composed by Robert Gordon, a prominent explorer, Ruby prospector and the principal engineer of the Irrawaddy River system, published in Calcutta by the Surveyor General of India’s Office.

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 drawing with calligraphic details by a French artist A. B. Duhamel, mostly known for his fashion engravings from the late 18th century. Gouache on paper with gold and silver highlights, 32 x 25 cm (12.6 x 9.8 inches), (traces of mounting verso, minor age-toning to the silver highlights).

  A highly decorative politically motivated calligraphy darwing in the immediate run-up to the French Revolution, made by the French ‘Master Calligraphers’ during the era, and one of the early images of spectacles, in the form we know today. 

  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 scarce, historically important and monumental map of Ontario’s Muskoka, Georgian Bay, Nipissing, Algonquin and Upper Ottawa Valley regions, based upon groundbreaking surveys, made as a blueprint for the regional settlement designs of Canada’s Department of Crown Lands, published in Toronto in 1857. 

  A scarce and monumental map of Quebec’s St. Maurice Territory, the northern section of the Montreal-Quebec City Corridor, based upon groundbreaking surveys, created as a blueprint for the settlement of the interior regions beyond the seigneuries along the St. Lawrence, published for Canada’s Department of Crown Lands by George Matthews in Montreal, in 1856. 

  A scarce and monumental map of Quebec’s St. Maurice Territory, the northern section of the Montreal-Quebec City Corridor, based upon groundbreaking surveys, created as a blueprint for the settlement of the interior regions beyond the seigneuries along the St. Lawrence, published for Canada’s Department of Crown Lands by George Matthews in Montreal, in 1856. 

  A very rare cartographic playing card featuring a map of the Canary Islands, being the ‘2 of Clubs’.

Walter Burley GRIFFIN (1876 - 1937) [and Marion Mahony GRIFFIN (1871 - 1961)] / Charles Robert SCRIVENER (1855 - 1923). [Canberra:] Federal Capital Commission, May 1927.   Colour lithograph, mounted upon original linen and folding into original purple cloth covers bearing gilt short title to upper cover, with handstamps to inside front cover and to verso of map: ‘H. Hurry…

  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…

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…

  A fine large format sheet of two charts featuring the discoveries in the Caroline Islands (1828) and New Guinea (1827) by Jules Dumont D’Urville’s during his first voyage on the Astrolabe.

The colossal, authoritative general map of Anatolia, the Levant, Lower Egypt and western Iraq made for strategic use by the French Army on the eve of World War I; these regions all being scenes of pivotal military action and espionage operations during and in the wake of the conflict, from which France played a critical (and controversial) role in the…

  Colour lithograph, 24 x 33 cm (9.44 x 13 inches) (soft fold, minor staining, otherwise in a good condition).  

  A very rare and excellent treatise on celestial navigation for mariners, anchored by a custom-made chart of the Northern Celestial Hemisphere, by the esteemed Danish astronomer and hydrographer Poul de Løvenørn.

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).

  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).  

OBERKOMMANDO DER KRIEGSMARINE (NAZI GERMAN NAVY HIGH COMMAND). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer (Andrews & Steiner), August 27, 1942. Photolithograph on thick paper, with the h Photolithograph on thick paper, with the handstamps of the ‘Kriegsmarinewerft Wilhelmshaven Kartengruppe’ as well as classification handstamps and a pastedown label regarding the accuracy of the chart (Very Good, overall clean and bright, some wear along…

  A rare, stellar and very large format bilingual (Chinese, French) map of China, made by Stanislas Chevalier, the polymath Jesuit-scientist who was famously the father of meteorology in China, beautifully colour lithographed at the Imprimerie Hong-pao-tchai, a printing house located at Zi-Ka-Wei, the missionary education-science centre in the Xuhui District of Shanghai, with Chinese-style blue silk endpapers, the map is…

[Complete Map of Various Foreign Countries’ Temporarily Divided Territory Boundaries within the City of Beijing.] [China, likely Beijing, no publisher, 1900].   A very rare, attractive and intriguing map, capturing Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion (1899 - 1901), when ‘Zongli Yamen’ (Legation Quarter) of the Old City was besieged by ultra-nationalist rebels, only for the barricade to be lifted by…

  A seemingly unrecorded, separately issued Ottoman map depicting the Siege of Port Arthur (1904-5), today part of Dalian, China, whereby a massive Japanese force took the heavily fortified Russian base after an unexpectedly brutal showdown, one of the great military events and global media spectacles fin-de-siècle era, and one watched with special interest by the Sublime Porte, long Russia’s…

  A rare, very large format official hydrological 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 water management and reallocation projects; published in Beijing by the China Cartographic Publishing House, the state workshop that specialized in producing such high-quality, original thematic…

  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.

A rare smaller colourful poster was made for a bicycle race across Slovenia, Croatia, and the Free Territory to Trieste. The race was organised by Yugoslavia in the time of the Tito-Stalin split, as a response to its expel from the popular Peace Race, organised by the Communist countries. 

  An uncommon separately published map of the island of Crete, shows the theatre of war of 1897, which lead to the establishment of the Cretan state a year later.

A seemingly unrecorded portrait of a Croatian philanthropist, industrialist and nobleman Šandor Alexander Sesvetski (1866-1929) from a prominent Zagreb Jewish family.   Cabinet card with albumen print and lettering in the lower margin and verso, contemporary signature in black ink in the lower right corner 16,4 x 10,7 cm (6.4 x 4.3 inches) (minor staining, corners slightly bumped, overall in…

  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 rare monumental series of 41 folding colour lithographs accompanying a Croatian poem Jama (The Pit), one of the most powerful WWII lyrics, written by Ivan-Goran Kovačić. This 1982 version of illustrations was made by Croatian academic artists Edo Murtić and Zlatko Prica, the authors of the first illustrated edition, printed by a Partisan underground press during WWII. Number 82 of…

Colour lithograph, 19,5 x 26 cm (7.6 x 10.3 inches) (soft fold, otherwise in a good condition).

  A scarce map of Czech Republich, made by the Pan-Slavic physical education movement Sokol, on the eve of the partition of the country.

  An exceedingly rare broadside with new regulations for Dalmatia, in Italian and Croatian language, printed in Venice.

A beautifully painted view of the lighthouse Grebeni off of the coast of Dubrovnik was painted by a Slovenian-born Anton Perko, a Royal Marine Draftsman to the Habsburg court.

  A pair of original photos, made during WWI by a Bulgarian lieutenant colonel Kableshkov, showcase temple ruins of Baalbek and reception room of a private mansion in Damascus.

  A rare gigantic atlas with highly decorative colour lithographed maps, charts and plans represents the regulations of the Danube Delta, after the Black Sea was pronounced neutral territory and the Danube opened a connection between the Central Europe and the Black Sea.

  A rare gigantic atlas with highly decorative colour lithographed maps, charts and plans represents the regulations of the Danube Delta after the Treaty of Paris, after the Black Sea was pronounced neutral territory and the Danube opened a connection between the Central Europe and the Black Sea.

Very Rare – the first broadly accurate and detailed map of the course of the lower Danube River, that flowed 1,400 km from Belgrade to the Black Sea; a colossal 7-sheet work (bound in atlas form) that would measure a course approximately 420 cm (almost 14 feet!) long if joined, based on the first serious attempt to map this vital…

  A rare, well designed Yugoslav statistical atlas for the north-eastern region of the country includes 21 well designed statistic maps, made by one of the leading Slovenian modern surveyors Peter Svetik.

A very rare and sophisticated work of data visualization celebrating the long and eventful reign of King George III, which saw Britain become the foremost global superpower, at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution; composed of series of centric circles that chronologically contextualize a vast amount of information, prepared by the London engraver Nathaniel Rogers Hewitt for the popular publisher…

Mapka narodowościowa i polityczna obszarów b. W. Ks. Litewskiego [Title on the Map] [National and Political Map of the Areas of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, with a Statistical Table]   A demographic map of Lithuania, showcasing various population of the area, made by a member of Provisional Political Committee of Kaunas Land, which supported the union of historical…

A particularly handsome example of Stanford’s map of Denmark and Iceland with original brown covers.   Copper engraved map, originally coloured in outline, dissected into 20 sections and mounted upon original linen, folding into original brown cloth covers with publisher’s pastedown label, publisher’s advertisements as front endpaper (Good, clean example), 68 x 55 cm (26.8 x 21.6 inches).

  A small collection of proof states and unique 3D drafts for caricatures, concerning WWII in Yugoslavia, featuring powerful Anti-Hitler, Pro-Allied, Pro-Serbian Royalist messages; made in New York early in 1942 by Jewish expatriates from Hungary, Derso and Kelen.

  The very first distance-time-route map of the Ottoman Empire, one of the great masterpieces of Hamidian Era thematic cartography, it depicts the entire realm of the Sublime Porte from Albania to Yemen, noting the travel times between hundreds of locations, including various routes of the Hajj; devised by the General Staff of the Ottoman Army and published in Istanbul.…

  A rare large tourist poster map of the Republic of Djibouti was mad after the independence in 1977.

  Rare documentary photographs of the inaguration of the Hindiya Barrage, south of Baghdad, Iraq, in 1891 with Arabic, Ottoman and European participants of the project.   4 photographs: albumen prints, 1 image: circa 11 x 16,5 cm (4.3 x 6.5 inches), 3 images: circa 12 x 17 cm (4.7 x 6.7 inches), contemporary mounted on thick cards: 22 x…

  A first issue of an exceedingly rare ephemeral Ottoman magazine, with possibly largest lithographed map of the world before the appearance of the late Ottoman chromolithographed atlases.   8°, 40 pp. with lithographed black and white plates, coloured folding lithographed map, 25 x 39 cm, original green wrappers with lettering on the inner sides (repaired tear in the folding…

  Extremely rare – 1 of only 3 known examples – an ‘Edital’ (Notice) broadside issued by the exiled Portuguese royal court in Brazil that encourages the cultivation of plants that have pharmacological and industrial uses, part of Brazil’s revolutionary economic liberalization programme overseen by the ‘Real Junta do Commercio’, published in Rio de Janeiro by the Impressão Regia, Brazil’s…

  A large and highly attractive Art Deco road map of Egypt made during World War II, as the country was fighting off an invasion by the German Afrikakorps; drafted by Alexandre Nicohosoff, an engineer who was for many years the premier commercial mapmaker in Alexandria.

  A beautifully drafted manuscript map of the Battle of Abukir (1799), a key showdown between French and Ottoman forces during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign, drafted in 1833 by the Austrian soldier Jacob Bodendorfer.

  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 rare advanced aeronautical chart of Central and South-western Ethiopia (including Addis Ababa) and Southern Sudan made in the wake of World War II, predicated upon the latest information supplied by Royal Air Force, published by the War Office in London.

  A very rare cartographic playing card featuring a map of Africa.

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

Copper engraving and etching, 39 x 26 cm (15.3 x 10.2 inches) (minor foxing, but overall in a good condition).

  [Maps of the Moon Hemispheres]   A scarce set of 6 maps of the Lunar surface, based on the latest American explorations and the  Soviet Lunokhod programme was made by a Czech astronomer and cartographer Antonín Rükl    Book, oblong small 4°, 15 pp., stapled. 6 colour prints (each 62 x 54 cm / 24.4 x 21.3 inches), folded in…

  A rare, unmounted fan leaf showcasing the Mutiny of Aranjuez and capture of Prime Minister of Spain Manuel Godoy, was made in London expressly to be exported to Spain. 

The probably first separately published forensic map showcases the location of a well-publicized early 19th century femicide, followed by a famous court case, which brought changes to English legal history. The author was Rowland Hill (1795-1879), an English social reformer and inventor. He is mostly famous as the inventor of the first adhesive pre-paid postal stamp, the Penny Black, in…

  Folio, 42 chromolithographed double-paged maps, original chromolithographed illustrated boards, recent black cloth spine, original green endpapers (boards with minor wear, light staining, light water-staining in the lower white margin of the rear cover, tiny chips to the margins of the front cover,  spine replaced, crack in the joints repaired, a tiny tear in the Great Britain map).