QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

A passion for history in all its printed forms and a keen nose for the treasures to be found between rare old covers are part of what drives rare book dealer Jörn Harbeck, who writes of some of his more interesting finds. When I came to Australia in late 1999, keen to set up as an rare book dealer, I was tricked by a book. It was a little old book. Quite old actually. It was the third printing in Greek of Homer’s Odyssey , printed in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1517. I bought this book in Brisbane and sold it soon after to a New York collector. What was so special about this? Aldus Manutius was the inventor of the small Octavo book format. Before him books were published in the larger formats of Folio and Quarto. Simply put: this book was the first pocket edition of the oldest literary text of the Western world, printed by one of the most famous early printers. Why do I say that this book tricked me? It made me think that books like this would turn up regularly in Brisbane, and that it would be relatively easy to set up a rare book dealership here. Antiquarian interests This was the type of book I knew from Europe. The Hamburger Antiquariat where I had worked for a number of years in the 1990s was a firm specialising in books printed before 1850. But finding books like this in Brisbane proved to be very difficult. There was the odd lucky find like a first edition of The Time Machine by H G Wells, or a collection of early 19th century scholarly books on the Byzantine Empire. These books I could sell online to collectors overseas. But there were not enough of them coming up in Brisbane. So I worked in a number of jobs as a research assistant and manuscripts cataloguer. During this time I began to understand that, to be successful as a rare book dealer in Australia, I had to find books with significant Australian content and bring them here from overseas. I had to turn myself from an exporter into an importer, starting in 2006.The first significant find I made was Stephen Simpson’s A Practical View of Homoeopathy (sic!), published in London in 1836, a very rare and early book on homeopathy. This colour-printed lithographic panorama of Brisbane in 1872 is indicative of Jörn’s spectrum of important historical documents.

He was among the earliest English homeopaths and had studied in Germany under Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy. Simpson arrived in Sydney in 1840 and came to Brisbane a year later, where he was promptly appointed acting colonial surgeon. When military government ended in Brisbane in May 1842, Simpson was appointed commissioner of Crown Lands, and the first acting administrator of the Moreton Bay District. (His property Wolston House at Wacol is today managed by the National Trust.) Sometime later I unearthed a hidden treasure of German Australiana. I had for a while been aware of Die Arachniden Australiens , a very rare book on Australian spiders by German 19th century arachnologist Ludwig Koch. When I finally saw a set offered, it was described as “the author’s own copy”. Hoping the author may have annotated the text, I was amazed to find that the book also included part of the original manuscript and some of the original drawings of spiders!

On top of that the printed illustrations were so-called proofs and featured quite a number of pencil corrections by the illustrator. This book was acquired from me by the National Library of Australia and will be displayed in their Treasures Gallery in 2013. Another very significant discovery, a year later, was an unknown map of Bass Strait, contained in the May 1802 issue of the Monatliche Correspondenz zur Beförderung der Erd- und Himmelskunde , a German journal on astronomy and geography, edited by Franz von Zach. This map was based on Matthew Flinders’ published chart of Bass Strait, and, more importantly, on a manuscript chart sent to Zach by Joseph Banks. Banks had received news of the recent voyage through Bass Strait by James Grant in the Lady Nelson , the first ship to sail it from west to east. Banks had passed this news on to Zach in a sketch, so that the German map shows the south coast of New South Wales from Mount Schank to Wilson’s Promontory, as well as the north coast of Van Diemen’s Land and the Bass Strait islands. The May 1802 date makes it is the first published map to show the Victorian coastline west of Western Port.

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