Catalogues

Whether alone or in teams, for pleasure or profit, sporting or seated, games have been an ever-present feature of every civilization. During the eighteenth century, not only were industrial advances making large-scale printing easier, but they were also generating something that had never before been available to the majority of society: leisure time. Paired with growing literacy rates across society and greater understanding of the importance of childhood education, this gave birth to a wave of new and unique games, especially in the form of jigsaw puzzles, playing cards, and board games.

Playing cards is, in many ways, a hallmark of civilisation. Like maps and money, a deck of cards is a way of representing an entire value system and an understanding of human nature on paper. A game of cards embodies the inherent unpredictability of life, allowing us to grapple with the uncertainties, directing them towards our own ends. At the card table, when the hands are dealt, all men are temporarily equal; it is how they choose to play those cards that determines who will draw ahead. The players are required to practice both strategic and emotional discipline, and one’s reaction to a bad hand or a sudden windfall can reveal much about his temperament and priorities. As in cards, so in life.

A new catalogue focusing on celestial cartography, a selection of items that show how humans have charted the heavens and marked time by the light of the stars for over 500 years.

We are delighted to present our latest catalogue: Hollar — comprising a single-owner collection of works by the master etcher: from maps, topographical views, and architectural drawings, to portraits, records of the latest fashion, and studies of animals.

Our latest catalogue in Chinese: 东游记 — Journey to the East; exploring the attempts of the English, Dutch, and French, to dominate and control the lucrative Spice Trade.

A new catalogue focusing on London, including a selection of Frost Fair prints, large-scale plans of London boroughs, and the first printed depiction of Elizabeth I as queen.

Popular from the end of the seventeenth century in London and Paris, trade cards performed the dual functions of advertisements and maps, directing the public to the merchants’ stores – often with rambling descriptions to help locate the business in an era where formal street address numbers were rare. Trade cards were sufficiently small so that they could be carried in the gentleman’s pocket or lady’s purse.

Ten years in the making, this collection of cartographic ephemera — including advertisements, catalogues, manuscript correspondence, portraits, price lists, and trade cards — physically illustrates the struggles, exchanges and e orts of some of the leading gures of the map trade over the past five centuries.

The world’s obsession with discovering the exotic source of cinnamon and other elusive spices grew throughout the Roman era and into the medieval period, defining what it meant to be wealthy and powerful. From India to Europe the trade had a profound social, emotional and economic impact; giving rise to some of the first truly international trade routes, and shaping the structure of the world economy in a way that can still be felt today.

An online catalogue containing maps of the region from Ptolemy to Cook.

A magnificent portolan atlas by Battista Agnese in its original binding, inscribed and attributed to Agnese by the eminent bibliographer Henry Harisse.