Search Results: Authors starting with K from Hordern House Rare Books

England, late-18th to early-19th century. In very good original condition.. Watercolour on paper, 235 x 275 mm, mounted. An appealing and early painting of the crimson rosella or "Pennantian Parrot", skilfully drawn and enigmatically signed in pen "WK'', further captioned "This Species is Often Found about Port Jackson N.S. Wales". While the image has obvious similarity to the engraving that appears in Governor Phillip's account of the new settlement (The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, 1789), certain details differ from that engraving, notably in the depiction of the tree and in the foreground. The text of the Phillip account (p.154) notes that "This beautiful bird is not infrequent about Port Jackson, and seems to correspond greatly with the Pennantian Parrot, described by Mr. Latham in the supplement to his General Synopsis of Birds, p. 61...". Latham, the great English ornithologist and scientific illustrator, was the first to describe more than a hundred new Australian birds,… Read More

London: F. Newberry, 1775. Twelve duodecimo volumes, with 117 engraved plates (of 118, lacking single plate); preliminaries thumbed, title of one volume perforated and another significantly browned, one leaf of text ink-stained, general foxing and offsetting; worn contemporary sheep, scuffed with split hinges; fair condition overall, as is often the case with juvenile literature of this period. A comprehensive natural history encyclopaedia for young people, based on Pennant's system of classification. Animals are arranged according to quadrupeds, fish, birds, and insects, and each of these classifications is separately indexed. Besides the more usual natural history descriptions of animals, vegetables and minerals this work is the first to describe for children Australia's most famous marsupial - the kangaroo. The entry under the Jerboa (vol. III p. 172) reads, 'Mr. Banks brought home the skin of an animal, which he calls the kanguroo [sic], which, from its general outline, and the most striking… Read More

N.p. (Japan), 1854. In good original condition.. Stitch sewn booklet measuring 149 x 79 mm., with two fine coloured woodblock prints, one double-page; original stitched wrappers, original cloth folding case; now preserved in a quarter morocco box. Charming Japanese publication, with two fine coloured woodcuts, one a double-page view of a Dutch ship entering Nagasaki Bay, and the other depicting a Russian naval officer in full dress uniform. This slight volume was published as a description of the various voyages of foreign nations that arrived in Japan, from the earliest times up to the arrival of Perry at Uraga and Shimoda in 1854. One of the prints was used in the publication two years earlier of Manjiro Nakahama's famous Record of Drifting. Dutch traders operated in Nagasaki in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries: they were confined to the island of Deshima (Dejima), in the harbour. Only about two hundred by eighty metres, it had originally been set aside for the Portuguese as a… Read More

Basel: printed by J.J. Tourneisen, 1789. Faint stain in margin of title and first few leaves.. Octavo; in a finely preserved contemporary binding of speckled polished sheep, red label. Scarce continental edition of one of the most popular eighteenth-century books on the Pacific, first published in London the previous year, and frequently reprinted and translated into a number of languages. Keate tells the story of the Antelope, wrecked in 1783 on an uncharted reef near Palau; the crew reached shore and were well treated by the natives. From the wreck they built a small boat which they managed to get to Macao, taking with them Prince Lee Boo, the son of King Abba Thule. Lee Boo travelled with them to England, but died soon after of smallpox. This account did much to reinforce the idea of the noble savage, but was also the main source for early knowledge of the Palau Islands in Micronesia. George Keate, who compiled this official account of the voyage from the papers of Wilson, the Antelope's captain,… Read More

Australia, 1880. Pair of horns, approx 800 mm height, mounted on metal stands with fittings, slate bases with inset marble panels, brass plaques. A testamentary relic to the rich story of the Kelly gang: a striking ornamental pair of bullocks' horns. They are decorated in scrimshaw with depictions of Ned Kelly and various members of the Kelly gang, including Kate Kelly, and Ned's favourite mare 'Music', with other decorations, some floral. Both gangsters and lawmen are represented as the figures engraved on the horns include Sergeant Michael Kennedy, whom Kelly killed in the shootout at Stringybark Creek. The horns are mounted on display bases and have brass plaques inscribed "The Kelly Gang". A remarkable period piece, this memorial is redolent of a time when Kelly was as much a hero as a villain. Though no Robin Hood, his story chimed with the larrikin psyche, inviting comparison with the American Wild West and its appealing folklore. . Provenance: Christie's Melbourne, 26 March 2002, lot 165, "A… Read More

London: Richard Bentley, 1853. A very good set; folding end pocket chart repaired.. Two volumes, octavo, with eight fine tinted lithograph plates (printed by Day & Son); folding chart in a rear pocket; in an excellent modern half calf binding. A fine set of this splendid book, with eight superb plates lithographed by Hawkins after Oswald Brierley. Henry Keppel had first served in the Malacca Straits in the early 1840s during the campaign against the Borneo pirates. During that time he formed a close friendship with Sir James Brooke, who had been appointed rajah of Sarawak in perpetuity by the sultan of Brunei. In 1847 Keppel returned to the region as captain of the frigate Maeander which was to convey Brooke to Labuan, an island off Borneo. 'At Brooke's suggestion, Labuan was ceded to Great Britain in 1846 by the Sultan of Brunei; it was made a crown colony, and Brooke was named governor. Keppel's book treats of the voyage to Labuan, incidents there, piracy in the South China Sea, and gives a… Read More

London: Chapman and Hall, 1846. Very slight fading to covers but an excellent copy.. Two volumes, octavo, with 11 fine tinted lithographs (printed by Day & Haghe), a folding table and six folding maps; original blue-green cloth. First edition: one of the best accounts of Borneo, partly in the form of a memoir of James Brooke who had been appointed rajah of Sarawak by the Sultan of Brunei. The Royal Navy officer Henry Keppel, later Admiral of the Fleet, was in the Malacca Straits in the early 1840s, acting against the Borneo pirates who had the area under their control; he gives a geographical overview of Borneo, and a good description of the Dyaks, the aboriginal Bornean tribes. As commanding officer of the corvette HMS Dido on the East Indies and China Station he was deployed in operations during the Opium War and was sent to the Straits in the 1843-44 campaign to suppress piracy. Keppel Harbour, a stretch of water at the southern tip of Singapore, was named for him after he cleared the straits of… Read More

London: Hippolyte Bailliere, 1842. Good.. Handcoloured stipple engraving, 220 x 140 mm. (leaf size). Portraits of two natives of King George's Sound, Western Australia, published in Prichard's The Natural History of Man. James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848) spent several decades amassing pictorial information to support his theory that all of the world's inhabitants shared a common ancestry and were originally dark skinned. His Natural History of Man contained portraits of the various human races drawn from published voyage and expedition accounts, and was an important foundation for modern ethnological science .

Basil: J.J. Tourneisen, 1788. Two volumes in one, small octavo; a good copy in half calf over speckled boards. The first continental edition: a Basle reprint of Kippis' biography of Cook, published the same year as the original. The catalogue of the Kroepelien collection points out that this is the first work to have eight chapters rather than seven (as in the London and Dublin editions of the same year), as one chapter is here split in half. This strongly suggests that this was the source of the later continental editions, which all followed this structure. Kippis' biography, based on Admiralty documents and sources, as well as information from Cook's widow and Sir Joseph Banks, was the standard life of the navigator for the next century. The account of Cook's death is sourced directly from Samwell, whose account (today exceptionally rare) had appeared in print two years earlier. The proposed settlement of Botany Bay is mentioned as a result of the voyages: 'If it be wisely and prudently begun and… Read More

London: John Cundee, 1810. Significant tear affecting one leaf, some browning, but a good set overall.. Two volumes, octavo, frontispiece and plates, recent orange cloth. Popular magazine of abridged (i.e. pirated) articles and literary extracts, including a 33 page account of Captain Cook's life loosely derived from Andrew Kippis' biography. Popular magazines such as the New Magazine of Choice Pieces flourished in early nineteenth-century London. The author states his intention of publishing 'in a limited space, and at a reasonable price, a pleasing variety of all that is valuable'. This set includes a lengthy life of Cook, accompanied by a folding frontispiece engraving of his death in Hawaii. Of additional interest is an entry of five pages describing the career of emancipated convict George Bruce, who married a New Zealand 'princess' (the daughter of Chief Tippahee), after living with the Māori for some years. The article glosses over Bruce's transportation, but notes 'At Port Jackson, Bruce… Read More

London: Seeley, Service and Company, 1929. The back board is mildly damp affected.. Octavo, frontispiece, fifteen ethnographic photo-plates, folding map, publisher's gilt cloth; bold bookseller's stamp on front endpaper, a handsome and attractive copy nonetheless. A somewhat racy account of native life in the Solomons, more anecdotal than anthropological, with much interesting observation. .

London: Virtue and Company, 1875. Very good.. Three thick quarto volumes, engraved vignettes, full page plates, page-edges gilt; in contemporary red morocco gilt, flat spines elaborately gilt, cloth boards marked. Beautifully illustrated collection of essays on the history of London bound in ornate handsome contemporary gilt decorated red morocco. In addition to hundreds of charming engraved vignettes the set includes a large number of fine and beautifully composed steel engraved plates specially commissioned for the work. Charles Knight (1791-1873) was one of the most prolific and industrious English publishers of the nineteenth-century. The magisterial six volume London remains one of his most ambitious projects, rivalling the scale and complexity of his widely acclaimed English Cyclopaedia. Knight was the son of a printer who went on to study journalism after completing training with his father. This combination of writing finesse and publishing canniness allowed Knight to publish engaging and… Read More

London: W. Faden, 1822. Lower blank margin chipped (but well outside plate mark), a very good copy.. Engraved chart, hand coloured; 605 x 890 mm. Detailed topographic map of the Albany district (present day South Africa) presenting a wilderness mapped but largely untamed. This map was published by William Faden (1749-1836), one of the more prolific cartographic publishers of the later eighteenth-century who began his trade with Thomas Jefferys. In 1783 Faden was appointed geographer to the king and by 1796 'he assembled an unrivalled stock of large-scale maps of the British counties'. Over the coming two decades Faden served the emerging market for maps of the colonies, of which this chart of the Cape of Good Hope is a good example. A sense of the frontier nature of this country is given in note engraved in a blank section to the northeast corner: 'fine pasture country, uninhabited and considered as neutral ground since to convention with the Caffre chiefs, after the last disturbances in the Year 1819'. . Read More

Amsterdam: Johannes van der Hey, 1822. Three volumes, each with engraved title-page (the last hand-coloured), four hand-coloured plates and three folding plates, five folding maps, an excellent set in early twentieth-century vellum, decorated gilt and blind. Fine set in vellum of the uncommon Dutch edition of the Kotzebue voyage to the Pacific, the second Russian scientific expedition. 'A Dutch edition of the first Kotzebue voyage, translated by P.G. Witsen Geysbeek, with prefaces by the translator in volume I and II and footnotes throughout. The three hand-coloured portraits in volume II are "Tameamea, Konig der Sandwich-Eilanden" (p. 28), a version of the "red vest" portrait by Choris; "Rarick" (p. 130); and "Kadu" (p. 230). A folding plate in volume II... depicts the heiau and Kamehameha's residence at Kailua, Kona. The hand-coloured vignette on the volume III title is of the butterfly named for Kamehameha' (Forbes). A fourth hand-coloured plate in the first volume depicts "Inwoners van… Read More

Gloucester: Printed by R. Raikes for T. Jeffrys, Geographer to His Majesty, 1764. Tear to two leaves expertly repaired.. Quarto, [8],280,[8]pp., with two folding maps and five plates. A fine copy in recent full polished calf with raised bands. First English edition of this important work, which had been published in Russian at St. Petersburg ten years earlier; translated and edited by the Edinburgh doctor, James Grieve, also remembered for his translation of Celsus. Four years later Chappe d'Auteroche used a French translation of Krasheninnikov's work as the second volume of his Voyage en Siberie. Krasheninnikov's was the first scientific account of Kamchatka, and represents an authentic and mostly eye-witness account of the area. He deals with the customs, morals and the religion of the inhabitants, and provides fascinating material on the shamanism prevalent there. There is a considerable amount of linguistic material, including comparisons between Kamchatkan, Cossack and Kurile dialects. The… Read More

London: John Murray, 1813. The map in vol. 1 little foxed otherwise a very good copy.. Two volumes in one, quarto, bound without the leaf of binder's directions noted by Forbes as usually absent; with a hand-coloured plate by Atkinson as frontispiece to each volume, and a folding map in vol. 1; modern half red morocco, gilt. First English edition: Ivan Fedorovich Krusenstern commanded this important Russian naval voyage to the Marquesas, Hawaii, Kamchatka, the Northwest Coast, China and Japan. His brilliant corps of officers -- Lisiansky (commanding the Neva), Rezanov, Langsdorff, Kotzebue and Bellingshausen -- all went on to make their mark on Pacific exploration. The expedition is famous for the stunning visual record created by the scientist and illustrator Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, whose images of tattooed men of the Marquesas (including European beachcombers) are some of the most enduring early nineteenth-century images of the Pacific. One such portrait, titled 'Native of Nukahiva' forms… Read More

Stuttgart and Tübingen: sumtibus J.G. Cottae, 1833-, 1850. Six volumes, octavo, each volume with both series title and individual title bound in, supplement volume with 40 plates, some toning and spotting; an excellent set in contemporary tan quarter calf, gilt. A magisterial six-volume work, heavily indebted to Robert Brown, and bringing plant catalogues into the modern scientific era. Hundreds of Australian plants are included, the vast majority now with carefully argued notes and great lists of references. Carl Sigismund Kunth (1788-1850) was a German botanist who worked closely with Alexander von Humboldt on plants from North and South America; this work is in fact dedicated to Humboldt. Kunth worked with both Humboldt and Bonpland in Paris from 1813-1819, before returning to become Professor of Botany at Berlin University in 1820, where he also became attached to the Botanical Garden. His collection became part of the Royal Herbarium in Berlin after his death. Where copies are seen at all, it… Read More