Antiques Trade Gazette 61


history of the Antipodes


russia that has been expertly rebacked and restored, this was a wide-marginned example in which the portrait, double- page map and 27 plates, printed on light blue paper, have all been hand coloured. The previous best was Aus$55,000


(then £30,250) paid for a copy in the same saleroom in 2009. In 2005, one of two Davidson copies


of the 1773 first editon, containing the rarely found four-page addition printing a letter from Sydney Parkinson to his cousin Jane Gomeldon, her reply and poem, that Stanfield seems to have added to just a few copies, was sold at Aus$32,000 (then £13,250) by ABA. Then in 2007, a copy inscribed by Stanfield Parkinson and thought to have been given by him to Jane Gomeldon, made $55,000 (then £27,650) as part of the Streeter library at Christie’s New York. A number of the more important lots


in the Australian Book Auctions sale came from the collections of a single collector, Ian Halliday, among them the first and best editions of the two volumes that make up the last, but most detailed, descriptive and the best-illustrated in topographical terms of the early accounts of the First Fleet voyage and English settlement in New South Wales. An Account of the English Colony in


New South Wales...., the first part of which was published in 1798, was the work of Judge Advocate David Collins, who was Governor Phillips’ secretary,


and updating his original, 1789 Narrative of an Expedition to Botany Bay. This sold at what also seems to be a record sum of Aus$10,000 (£6340). Three copies of the official account


of the 1800-04 Baudin expedition to Australia ordered by Napoleon, the Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes..., have been seen at auction in recent times. Nicholas Baudin died in Mauritius


in 1803, on the return voyage, and the account of the voyage was initially undertaken by the expedition’s naturalist François Péron, but he too died before publication was complete and the task was completed by the cartographer, and expedition commander after Baudin’s death, Louis Freycinet. The French survey of the Australian


Above: that curiosity of Australian wildlife, the duckbill platypus, is seen here in one of the coloured plates from the copy of Péron & Freycinet’s Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes... of 1807-16 that sold for $50,000 (£31,000) as part of the Jacques Levy library at Sotheby’s New York.


close friend and adviser. The second, less commonly encountered part, which takes the account up to 1801, was based almost entirely on the papers of the colony’s second governor, John Hunter. In chronicling later events, it includes narratives of both inland voyages of discovery – featuring the first sightings of such creatures as the koala, wombat and lyre-bird – and the coastal voyages of Bass and Flinders.


Entirely uncut and unpressed in the


original boards, the spine of the first volume since rebacked in parchment, the two volumes of 1798 and 1802 sold at a record Aus$30,000 (£19,015). Described as in exemplary original


condition was Halliday’s copy of Captain Watkin Tench’s Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson – his second account of the new colony, published in 1793, following his return to England,


coastline had actually been preceded by that of Matthew Flinders, but on his return to England he was imprisoned for several years by the French in Mauritius and his charts impounded, allowing the Péron- Freycinet account to be first into print, in the years 1807-16. No acknowledgement is made of the work of Flinders, Grant or Murray in this account – nor indeed is any mention made of Baudin’s own contribution. The work comprises two text volumes


and a two-part atlas containing 40 engraved plates (23 hand coloured) and


continued on page 62 Scrolled and sealed – bibliographical curiosities


Right and below: a seal used by that insatiable bibliophile, Sir Thomas


Phillipps, sold for $15,000 (£9540) in New York.


SIR Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) was perhaps the most voracious collector of books and manuscripts the world has ever seen. Starting to collect whilst still a boy at Rugby, he went on to acquire an estimated 40,000 books and some 60,000 manuscripts and the dispersal of his vast collections, which began in 1886, was still going on in the latter decades of the last century. In 1945, Lionel and Philip Robinson had


acquired the still substantial ‘remainder’ of his vast collections in 1945 in what was then the biggest private purchase ever made by a book dealer, and over the following decades they continued to sell the books on, both privately and via a lengthy series of sales at Sotheby’s. Offered at Christie’s New York on


April 10, as part of the Kenneth Nebenzahl library, was Phillipps’ personal seal, an ivory and gold seal with a carnelian head that is delicately carved to a floral ground with a calligraphic inscription in nasta’liq Arabic script that renders his name as ‘Tahmas Fil Bs’ – see illustrations left.


Acquired by Nebenzahl from another


famous name in the antiquarian book trade, E.P. Goldschmidt, the seal was sold in New York at $15,000 (£9450). With the possible exception of a single


Korean specimen, said Bloomsbury Auctions in the catalogue for their May 15 London sale, the block printed dharani or charm seen right is an example of the earliest extant printing. It was around 770AD that, to mark


the end of a civil war and to promote the future protection of the empire, the Empress Shotoku ordered the manufacture of a million miniature painted wooden ‘Hyakumanto’ pagodas to be distributed to Buddhist temples across Japan. Each of these temples – the top of this 8in (20cm) high example now missing – contained a hemp paper prayer scroll on which are printed 30, five-character columns. A few examples have found their


way to auction in recent times. In 2008, Bloomsbury sold an example with a complete pagoda top in their New York


Above: the earliest datable example of printing, a Japanese prayer scroll and its wooden pagoda container, both dating from c.770AD. Sold for £14,000 in London.


rooms for $32,000 (then £16,050) and for this slightly defective one they took a bid of £14,000.


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