Travel, Atlases, Maps and Photographs

Online Auction: 17–24 May 2022 • 2:00 PM BST • London

W e invite you to join us on a voyage of discovery and exploration through wonderful atlases, maps, books and photographs.

Leading the sale is the largest single collection of Qajar photographs of Persia to appear at auction (lot 70), comprising some 4,000 photographs from the 1860s to the 1920s. Subjects include royal portraits, women of the court, religious and military figures, views of palaces and gardens, country and village scenes, daily life and events.

Cartographic highlights range from a 1584 world atlas by Abraham Ortelius (lot 3), and two magnificent sea-atlases: the Neptune François [Amsterdam 1700] (lot 2), and Johannes and Gerard van Keulen’s De Groote nieuwe vermeerderede Zee-Atlas, [1709] (lot 8), to a very large unique map of Antarctica hand-drawn in 1918 by the great polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton (lot 111).

The Middle East section includes the journals of adventurer Alan Villiers relating to his sailing voyage in a dhow through the Gulf from Kuwait to East Africa in the 1930s (lot 79); alongside which are offered Villiers’s Ottoman sword, Arab dress, and photographs of his travels (lots 80-81).

China in the 1700s is described in a series of highly important letters by various missionaries (lots 91-94), notably a remarkable series of c.29 autograph letters by the Jesuit Antoine Gaubil who writes on Chinese astronomy and science (lot 93).

Highlights of Polar exploration include a Norwegian flag carried by Roald Amundsen on his expeditions to the north and south poles (lot 104); a first edition of the South Polar Times inscribed by Captain Scott to his mother (lot 105); an original edition of the Aurora Australis, the first book printed in Antarctica (lot 106); a sledge from the “Terra Nova” Expedition of 1910-13 (lot 107); a Chilean medallion presented to Shackleton (lot 110); and a very large map of Antarctica drawn by Shackleton, as mentioned above (lot 111).

Here we come full circle around the globe and we hope you will discover many more treasures in this sale for you to begin a collection or to add to your library.