Catalogues
Daniel Crouch Rare Books publishes a number of catalogues each year, focusing on rare maps, antique atlases, globes & planetaria, antiquarian books, fine prints and other works on paper. These range from deluxe printed catalogues of single-owner collections and interactive online catalogues to specialised digital short-lists and exhibition lists for the numerous specialist events relating to rare maps and books that we attend throughout the year, around the world.
From here, you can download or, where applicable, purchase our catalogues directly. For more information on our past catalogues, or if you have a collection you would like to see brought to market in a similar fashion, please contact us.
Published: 20 November 2024 view online »
If journalism is, as they say, the first draft of history, then perhaps photography is the raw material of memory; in the sense not just of personal mementoes (though that’s often the way photographs start out), but also of shared recollection. And that sort of collective remembering is, in turn, the stuff of history’s sister, culture, and of identity.
Published: 9 October 2024 view online »
Maps are scientific instruments. They offer proof of truth. They portray measured relationships between objects and ideas. To achieve this, however, maps must reduce, omit, and distort a three-dimensional world onto a flat piece of paper. This is the paradox of cartography: to tell the truth, a map must lie.
Published: 1 October 2024 view online »
In antiquity, the earliest geographers and cartographers hypothesised a southern landmass to balance out the northern hemisphere, and when, in the second century, Ptolemy asserted that the Indian Ocean was bounded by land to the south, the legend of a terra australis incognita was born.
Published: 24 September 2024 view online »
The Commonwealth of Dominica. The Nature Island. Wai’tu kubuli, which, in the language of the indigenous Kalinago Indians, translates as ‘Tall is her body’. This collection, assembled over two generations, portrays Dominica through one hundred maps, prints, books, manuscripts, and ephemera.
Published: 10 September 2024 view online »
Three thousand years of history, geography, religion, and politics in one thousand maps, plans, and books. There exists a deep-rooted affinity between the history of cartography and the history of the Holy Land. The region served as the subject of the very first survey recorded in writing (Joshua 18:4) and continued to play a prominent role in cartography throughout the following millennia. Please note that shipping is not included. Costs are: £25 to the UK, £35 to Europe, and £45 to the rest of the world.
Published: 9 April 2024 view online »
“There is nothing in the world of fine books quite like the first discovery of Audubon. The giant energy of the man, and his power of achievement and accomplishment, give to him something of the epical force of a Walt Whitman or a Herman Melville. … Audubon is the greatest of bird painters; he belongs to American history, and as a writer he described things that human eyes will never see again” (Sitwell)
Published: 8 April 2024 view online »
“Every hand’s a winner!” - A catalogue of 57 decks of playing cards from c1630-1991, including a pack unknown until 2016, a gorgeous set of embroidered silk brocade cards, Ganjifa cards, and several English seventeenth century decks.
Published: 5 February 2024 view online »
Our latest catalogue offers a very select group of the earliest, the most important, and fiendishly rare, maps, atlases, and travel accounts, which are the first printed attempts by European commentators and adventurers, to depict their world, and the emerging outline of the Americas.
Published: 23 January 2024 view online »
‘From Sea to Shining Sea’, the Petros G. Pelos Collection of exceptionally rare first-hand printed and manuscript travel accounts, atlases, portfolios, and governmental proclamations. Offered together as a single entity, these 100 items not only reflect the emerging shape of the United States, from the end of the Revolutionary War to the beginning of the Civil War, but were fundamentally instrumental in creating its identity.
Published: 10 October 2023
A cartographic voyage across time and space.
Published: 9 October 2023
The William B. Ginsberg collection of World Maps; an epitome of the most beautiful, powerful, and influential cartographical images of the 15th and 16th centuries. The earliest printed maps condensed and edited information from three “traditions” of map-making: Christian iconography, classical cartography, and contemporary charts. Ginsberg’s collection encapsulates the subtle metamorphosis of this amalgam of art and science, myth and metaphor, discovery and design, in nineteen maps: from the world map of the ‘Rudimentum novitiorum’ (1475), the earliest printed map, in magnificent original hand-colour; to the largest Italian world map published in the 16th century, Giuseppe Rosaccio’s ‘Universale Descrittione di Tuto il Mondo’ (1657).