Jun 25, 2016 | Videos
Presented by Adam Douglas and Dominic Somerville of Peter Harrington.
52 works in 61 volumes. All are octavo unless otherwise stated, and in general found in at least very good condition, with occasional sympathetic restoration. Almost all titles contain Back’s bookplate, and his laid-in notes recording provenance and useful bibliographic information. A full description is available on request.
A remarkable collection of more than 50 books on polar, South American, and Australasian exploration, including rare high-spots of 18th-century Pacific and Antarctic exploration, a choice selection of Victorian attempts at the North-West Passage, and several rare narratives from the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, many with superb associations, and several of utmost scarcity in commerce.
Standing at the head of the collection is Phillip Parker King’s annotated copy of his extremely rare Sailing Directions for the Coasts of Eastern and Western Patagonia (1832), which he compiled as captain of the Adventure on her first surveying voyage with the Beagle (1826–30). It is accompanied by a presentation copy of his Sailing Directions for South America (1850), inscribed to Captain John Lort Stokes, who shared a cabin with Charles Darwin on the Beagle’s second voyage, and also containing King’s assiduous annotations. Of comparable scarcity is Viana’s Diario, the only full account of Spain’s greatest 18th-century voyage of Pacific exploration, led by Alessandro Malaspina: it was printed in 1849 on the itinerant press of the army besieging Montevideo in the Uruguayan War.
Other landmarks include the first edition of Pernety’s Journal (1769), an account of the first settlement on the Falkland Islands, established by French circumnavigator Louis de Bougainville, the Back family copy of George Back’s Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition (1836), and Richard King’s elusive and highly critical account of the same expedition, published the same year.
These books were gathered together over a period of 40 years by Eric Kenneth Prentice “Kenn” Back (b. 1942), meteorologist with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) from 1963 to 2002, and a descendant of Arctic explorer George Back.
During his distinguished career Back saw out eight Antarctic winters (which he believed to be “a BAS record”), completing postings as base commander at Halley, Faraday and Rothera stations, undertook several research secondments to the Canadian Arctic explored by his ancestor.
During what he describes as “a long period of vagrancy”, he worked and travelled widely in Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific. He is one of a select group of people to have received both the Fuchs Medal, in 1979, and the Polar Medal, awarded the following year. A copy of the full text of Kenn’s informative curriculum vitae, an agreeable.
Jun 25, 2016 | Videos
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington.
7 volumes, octavo. (250 147 mm). Recently rebound to style in black half morocco, gilt panelled spines with owl and eagle motifs, contemporary marbled sides, speckled edges, endleaves renewed. 500 hand-coloured lithographic plates after Audubon by W. E. Hitchcock, R. Trembley and others, printed by J. T. Bowen of Philadelphia (plates 1–135, 151–500) or George Endicott of New York (plates 136–150), numerous wood-engraved anatomical figures in text. A few plates trimmed by the binder with concomitant shaving of a few captions (encroaching on the plate itself in only one instance). An excellent set.
First octavo edition of Audubon’s “Great National Work”, the first complete edition and the first American edition, the original double-elephant folio was published in Edinburgh and London between 1827 and 1838. A very handsome set, the plates clean and fresh, of the “most beautiful, popular, and important natural history books published in America in the nineteenth century… representing the best of pre-Civil War American lithography and giving Audubon the opportunity finally to display his scholarship and genius to a large American audience for the first time” (Ron Tyler). The plates, here accompanied by the text for the first time, were reduced and variously modified from the Havell engravings in the double-elephant folio. Seven new species are figured and seventeen others, previously described in the Ornithological Biography but not illustrated, are pictured for the first time. Audubon may have been prompted to publish the reduced version of his double-elephant folio by the appearance in 1839 of John Kirk Townsend’s rival Ornithology of the United States, or, as he writes in the introduction to the present work, he may have succumbed to public demand and his wish that a work similar to his large work should be published but “at such a price, as would enable every student or lover of nature to place it in his Library”. The first edition of the octavo work now represents the only realistic opportunity that exists for collectors to own an entire collection of Audubon images in a form that was overseen and approved by the great artist himself.
Jun 25, 2016 | Videos
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington.
Median quarto (232 164 mm). Bound in the third quarter of the 19th century by Francis Bedford (his name in gilt at the foot of the front turn-in) in reddish-brown crushed goatskin, spine divided in six compartments by raised bands, gilt-lettered in two compartments, the others with gilt devices, sides with frames formed of gilt and thick-and-thin blind rules, gilt centrepieces, turn-ins ruled in gilt and in blind, gilt edges (spine a little faded; extremities rubbed). Housed in a burgundy flat-back cloth box. 172 leaves, including the final blank. Greek types 114 (two sets of capitals designed by Laskaris, one large for headings and initials letters, one small for the text). Commentary (10–33 lines) in miniscule surrounding text (3–31 lines) in majuscule. Greek marginalia in an early hand in six places; the publication date added in arabic numerals in ink at the foot of the final text leaf; an excellent copy, well-margined, clean and fresh.
Editio princeps. A remarkable presentation copy, inscribed on the verso of the final blank from the Greek scholar Robert Pember to his friend and student Roger Ascham: “R. Pemberi hunc librum dono dedit Rogero Aschamo testi magistro Fitzerbert et multis aliis.”
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