Travel
Contact Jonathan Harrison, Alex Day or Andrea Mazzocchi
We stock Western books in European languages, generally – but not exclusively – published before circa 1850. We are especially interested in early travel accounts – from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries – in all areas beyond Europe.
Geographical regions in which we have tended to specialise include the Pacific and its surrounding countries – South America, the Northwest Coast of America, Japan, China, the maritime regions of Asia, including the Philippines and Indonesia, and Australia. Books on Africa, the polar regions, manuscripts and separately published maps are also handled.-
KEATE, George.
An Account of the Pelew Islands, situated in the western part of the Pacific Ocean: composed from the journals...
Dublin, Luke White, 1788.
First Dublin edition of this popular work, first published in London earlier the same year, by the virtuoso George Keate, member of the Royal Society and Society of Antiquities (1729−1797).
£650
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[ATO PHOTOGRAPHIC ASSOCIATION.]
Album of 100 gelatin silver prints of Tianjin (Tientsin), the Hai (Peiho) estuary, and Beijing...
[Circa 1930s.]
An attractive example of the commercially available albums produced by the Ato Photographic Association in the 1920s–30s. The present album is devoted to the area formerly known as Zhili or Chihli, encompassing Beijing and Tianjin. Small groups of images are devoted to the Hai forts and to...
£2500
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[ATO PHOTOGRAPHIC ASSOCIATION.]
Album of 100 gelatin silver prints of Fuzhou (Foochow) and Yunnan.
[1930s.]
Includes panoramas of Fuzhou apparently taken at different dates (the captions state a population of variously 600,000 and 700,000), and scenes of Kunming, the capital of Yunan province. There is an interesting short series on railway engineering in Yunnan province, and images of zinc mining, and poppy...
£2500
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[BEIJING.]
Album of Beijing and environs.
[1920s.]
A meticulously presented and captioned series of views, by a tourist or resident in Beijing (then Peking) with a thorough approach to recording their experience of the city and environs.
£1500
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[MONTANUS, Arnoldus.]
Ambassades mémorables de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales des Provinces Unies, vers les empereurs du Japon....
Amsterdam, Jacob van Meurs, 1680.
First edition in French of an important and influential study of Japan by the Dutch theologian and historian Arnoldus Montanus, based on eyewitness accounts from two Dutch East India Company (VOC) missions to Japan in 1649 and 1661.
£3500
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‘G.’ [i.e. Terence Ian Fytton ARMSTRONG].
Annotations on Some Minor Writings of “T.E. Lawrence” by G.
London: W. Graves for Eric Partridge, Ltd. at the Scholartis Press, 1935.
First edition, no. 484 of 500 copies. Annotations was the second bibliographical work on Lawrence to be published, and was written by the poet, author, bibliographer, and bookseller T.I.F. Armstrong (AKA ‘John Gawsworth’), who possessed ‘a bibliographic talent that led Lawrence Durrell to...
£75
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[DELAMARCHE, Alexandre, cartographer; Bernard COUDERT, lithographer.]
‘Atlas’.
Paris, Legay, [c. 1889].
An attractive set of large educational jigsaw maps showing the world, Europe, and France, preserved in its original allegorical box.
£875
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FLEMING, Peter.
Brazilian Adventure.
London: Queen Anne Press, 2010.
First edition thus, no. 120 of 150 copies. 'In April 1932 Fleming answered an advertisement in the agony column of The Times, which led him to take part in a crack-brained and amateurish expedition to the hinterland of Brazil, ostensibly to look for Colonel P.H. Fawcett, a missing explorer....
£125
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[MAPS.]
‘Carte du Vicariat Apost. de Péking & Tche-ly Nord’.
[China], 1896.
Two handsome maps providing a snapshot of the region around modern Beijing and the Bohai Sea encompassed within the Vicariate Apostolic of Northern Chi-Li and the Vicariate Apostolic of Southwestern Chi-Li in 1896, showing towns, missionary residences, roads, railways, rivers and lakes, and part...
£1800
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CARY, John.
‘Cary’s New Pocket Plan of London, Westminster and Southwark; with all the adjacent Buildings in St. George’s...
London, ‘Printed for J. Cary, Engraver, Map & Printseller, No 181, Strand,’ 1 January 1800.
Cary’s folding pocket map of London, from Hyde Park and Chelsea in the West to Bethnal Green and Rotherhithe in the East, showing the development of London’s communications network.
£450
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SMITH, Arthur Henderson.
Chinese characteristics …
Shanghai, printed and published at the “North-China Herald” office, 1890.
First edition of this important and influential work on China by the American missionary Arthur Henderson Smith (1845–1932), for many decades the most widely read American book on the Chinese.
£550
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SICARDO, José.
Christiandad del Japon, y dilatada persecucion que padecio. Memorias sacras, de los martyres de las ilustres religiones...
Madrid, Francisco Sanz, 1698.
Rare first edition of this important and comprehensive account of Christian missions to Japan by the Spanish Augustinian José Sicardo (1643–1715).
£12000
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PLAYFAIR, George Macdonald Home.
The Cities and Towns of China. A geographical dictionary …
Hong Kong, Noronha & Co., 1879.
First edition of a dictionary of Chinese towns and cities by G.M.H. Playfair (1850–1917), based upon the French Sinologist Édouard Biot’s earlier Dictionnaire of 1842.
£600
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COLLIE, John Norman.
Climbing on the Himalaya and other Mountain Ranges.
Edinburgh, T. and A. Constable for David Douglas, 1902.
First edition, published in the year that Collie (1859-1942) became professor of organic chemistry at University College London. ‘Besides his eminence as a scientist, [Collie] acquired great fame as a climber and explorer of mountains. Beginning with the Cuillin peaks in Skye, where he discovered many...
£750
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FOREST, BISSON FRERES, &c.
A collection of eight albumen prints (or salt and albumen collages) from mammoth-plate negatives...
France, 1864-5.
An exceptional series of oversize prints commissioned by the Compagnie de Chemins de Fer de l‘Ouest to commemorate the construction of a series of new bridges completed 1861–1864, including the metal bridge at Orival, later destroyed in the Franco-Prussian War, and the oblique stone bridge of...
£30000
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DAMPIER, William, et al.
A Collection of Voyages. In four volumes. Containing I. Captain William Dampier’s voyages round...
London, for James and John Knapton, 1729.
The first collected edition, ‘considered by many to be the best’ (Hill), illustrated with seventeen maps and forty-six plates.
£9500
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ALEXANDER, William, attributed.
The Costume of the Russian Empire, illustrated by a Series of seventy-three Engravings....
London, ‘printed for William Miller … by Howlett and Brimmer … 1803’, [c. 1823].
A later reprint of a handsome costume book devoted to the Russian empire, first printed by Samuel Gosnell for William Miller in 1803, illustrated with seventy-three coloured stipple engravings.
£950
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[BEIJING.]
[Cover title:] ‘The most interesting views of Peiping’.
[c. 1900–1920.]
A very good example of a commercial souvenir album of Beijing and the Great Wall of China.
£1750
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[BEIJING.]
[Cover title:] ‘The most interesting views of Peiping’.
[C. 1900–1910.]
A very unusual commercial album of Beijing, with thirty-eight hand-coloured scenes of the city, probably taken using a swing-lens panoramic camera.
£2000
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LAET, Joannes de, editor.
De imperio Magni Mogolis sive India vera commentarius e variis auctoribus congestus …
Leiden, ‘ex officina Elzeviriana’, 1631.
Pocket-sized Elzevir edition (one of two issued in the same year) of this work on India and the Mughal Empire compiled by the Dutch geographer Joannes de Laet (1581–1649), this copy, exceptionally, in its original drab boards.
£950