The first list for 2025 by Douglas Stewart Fine Books , Melbourne , is a bobby dazzler with 150 rare and important offerings covering natural history ,early works on China and the Far East , Australian photographs and ephemera , original art and artists' books.
A rarity is the above 1943 Christmas presentation copy by P.L. Travers , the Australian born author whose early childhood was spent in the Queensland sugartown of Maryborough , and wrote the children's classic Mary Poppins .
The slim volume was privately printed in New York,limited to 500 copies, by the High Grade Press for her friends .
In it Travers recalled , with affection, Ah Wong, the family's Chinese cook.
‘I was ten when I first met him. The place was a sugar plantation in the tropics of Australia, and the day juts out like a promontory from the level lands of memory.’
Ah Wong , a memoir of that time and place , consisting of blue wrappers and 23 pp , inscribed by Travers , priced at $165O, sold quickly.
Travers went to New York during World War II while working for the British Ministry of Information. Walt Disney contacted her about selling the rights for a film adaptation of Mary Poppins. Wikipedia says that after years of contact, which included visits to Travers at her home in London, Walt Disney obtained the rights and the film Mary Poppins, premiered in 1964.
Other offerings by Douglas Stewart included an early book on the natural history of New South Wales birds, $55,000, and two on New Zealand birds - $12,000 and $15,000; death warrants for two men guilty of murder at Ballarat goldfield in 1858, $7000 ; a 1980 Standing Nude by John Brack , $55,000 ; an l868 waterolour by Rose Selwyn of a croquet match outside the police magistrate's residence, Newcastle , New South Wales.
A book which sold quickly was the 1944 The art of Albert Namatjira, a pioneer of contemporary Indigenous art , a longtime resident of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. It was a first edition, presentation copy inscribed by C. P. Mountford for Robert Henderson Croll, of the Melbourne Bread and Cheese Club , who wrote the foreword.
The inscription read : ' To R. H. Croll, a fellow lover of the simple courteous dark folk of the “Centre,”, and its great solitudes. C. P. Mountford'
Loosely enclosed were a number of contemporary newspaper cuttings relating to this landmark publication and an autographed letter by artist Lionel Lindsay , signed (Wahroonga, 26 April 1944), addressed to Croll, thanking him for sending a copy of the book and discussing Namatjira’s work (4 pp. octavo) , accompanied by the original mailing envelope).
(Poppins, Namatjira , Chinese.)
