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Translation from Chinese of twelve poems and short texts featuring autumn motifs by Richard Wilhelm.

An amazing original artefact from the Japanese Imperial Court during the glorious days of the Meiji Emperor, and of Japan’s ongoing opening to the West, being the original manuscript invitation presented to Joaquim José da Graça, the Governor of Macau and the Portuguese Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan, to attend an audience with the Meiji Emperor on July 5, 1882, written…

The very rare first state of J.F.W. Des Barres’s beautifully rendered chart of Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts, famously the site of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ landing at ‘Plymouth Rock’; after the first scientific mapping of the bay executed by Thomas Wheeler, as part of Samuel Holland’s General Survey of the Northern District of British North America, an epic endeavour that trigonometrically charted…

A rare publication with an early article on the cultivation of potatoes in Austria.

An amazing survivor, being an original manuscript caricature drafted during the Eighth European-Xhosa War (1850-3), one of the century-long series of brutal conflicts between Dutch, and more recently British, forces and the formidable Xhosa nation for control over the Eastern Cape Frontier, South Africa’s ‘Wild, Wild East’; involving a very clever use of imagery and dialogue, the caricature shows two…

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…

An amazing artifact of Indonesian Independence, being an original draft of the first constitution of an independent Indonesia, as ratified at the famous ‘Round Table Conference’ (August 23 to November 2, 1949) in The Hague that set the final arrangements for the county’s sovereignty which was achieved on December 27, 1949; the present crudely-made mimeograph of a typescript is one…

[20 pp.], 23 x 19 cm (9 x 7.5 inches), manuscript in Italian, in dark brown ink on 10 sheets of laid paper with a post horn watermark and name of Van der Ley paper makers, and watermarks with initials GR and a crown (minor age-toning, tiny holes from binding on the spine, unbound and inserted in a later marbled…

Very Rare – the first edition of ‘Monzongo’, “the most popular anti-slavery production staged across the Netherlands until well into the nineteenth century”, authored by Nicolaas Simon van Winter, the eminent merchant, poet and dramatist who became an ardent Abolitionist upon witnessing the brutal Dutch crackdown which ended the Berbice Slave Rebellion (1763-4), in modern-day Guyana; the play concerns an…

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 exceedingly rare depiction of a Prague folk festival for the Coronation of Emperor Ferdinand I and Maria Anna of Savoy, lithographed in Litoměřice, showcases unique ethnographic and documentary details from this historic event as well as the diversity of Bohemian culture and social life of the early 19th century in Prague.   Lithograph, 55 x 69 cm (21.6 x…

A rare map of the Bosporus commissioned by Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II and created by Prussian military surveyor Helmuth von Moltke.   Lithography with original colour in outline, 73,5 x 68 cm (29 x 26,77 inches), dissected in 20 segments and mounted on linen. An advertisement of Artaria, Vienna, on green paper mounted on one of the segments verso. Housed…