Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History

Online Auction: 27 April–13 May 2021 • 4:30 PM BST • London

W e are delighted to present the May edition of our twice-yearly sale of beautifully illustrated works of natural history, rare world maps, extraordinary atlases, topographical photographs and fine colour-plate books. Leading the sale is a splendid copy of Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, the finest town-book from the golden age of cartography, offered here in a contemporary binding. Other fine atlases include ground-breaking works by Ortelius and Blaeu.

Works of topography through the ages abound, from early accounts of travels in the Near and Middle-East (Nicolay’s Navigations, peregrinations and voyages made into Turkie, 1596) to an extraordinary photographic record of travels in Tibet and Lhasa made in the 1930s. Egypt is especially well represented by two famous works: a fine tinted set of Roberts’s The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia, and Maxime du Camp’s incredibly rare Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie from 1852, one of the earliest books to include a substantial collection of original photographs of Egypt and Palestine.

Highlights in the field of natural history include one of the great American colour plate books - Elliot’s Monograph of the Phasianidae, and wonderful albums of drawings by Archibald Thorburn and J.G. Keulemans.

Natural History, lots 1-34
Maps & Atlases, lots 35-59
Europe, lots 60-73
Voyages, lots 74-83
Mediterranean & Middle East, lots 84-148
Americas, lots 149-156
Africa, lots 157-159
Asia, lots 160-184
Antarctic Exploration, lots 185-192