Billings Commodore (5 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. No Jacket. New edition. Octavo. Original cloth gilt. Folding map and plates. Minor mark to the front board else a fine, tight, clean copy.

Full-Leather. Condition: Fair. French Text. Illustrated with Full-Page engraved Plates. Plates VI to XIV only, the first 5 Plates and the the the 16th have been removed. Period Brown Full-Leather binding with Gilt Greek Key decorative border on front & back. 11 1/2" Tall. Leather backstrip missing from spine. Small bits of leather missing around edges. Penciled bookseller note on fly leaf. No other inscriptions. Plates in good, clean condition.

Hard Cover. Condition: Good. Two volume set, hardback in original full calf. Each 20.5 x 13cm. xxiv, 385pp; 418pp. Without the separate atlas volume. French text translated by J. Castera. Binding worn and somewhat rubbed. Some wear to spine ends, and a split along half of the spine edge of volume two, but binding remains secure. Inside the odd spot but generally clean.

Hard Cover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. First Edition. First French translation of the work published in English the same year. Lacks the large atlas volume. Rebound with new end sheets. Bottom corner torn from last text page in first volume (no loss of text), faintly foxed throughout. 1802 Hard Cover. xxiv, 385, [1]; 418 pp. 8vo. French text. An account of Commodore Joseph Billings's expedition in search of a northeast passage on behalf of Catherine the Great (1785-1794), which resulted in significant advances in maps of Siberia, Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, Prince William Sound, etc.

Condition: very good. xxvi,(1),332,58 pp. Quarto (22 X 26.5 cm.) Bound in original full tree calf with a new calf spine to match. Flat spine ruled into 6 compartments. Title label in the 2nd compartment and date at the bottom. The reback has been extremely well done. Edges of text block stained blue. Original endpapers. Half title with old vertical crease. Large folding map as frontispiece. 14 plates all with small circular rubber stamp on the image. Generally, a very clean crisp, attractive copy other than the rubber stamps. Cox I 353; Hill 1528; Howes S-117; Lada-Mocarski 58; Lowndes 2192; Sabin 77152. Martin Sauer was appointed as Private Secretary and Translator to the Russian expedition led by Captain Billings between 1785 and 1794; his narrative is 'taken from the journal written for Captain Billings, which I copied from the ship's journal kept by the Master Batakoff and his mates' (p.xiii). The book contains early mentions of mammoths as definitively extinct animals, following Georges Cuvier's paleontological study, while the appendices provide vocabularies of the languages spoken in the areas visited, Catherine the Great's instructions to the crew, and other material relating to the expedition. The wonderful plates show many classic images of indigenous peoples in clothing and hats. Oh, to own just one of these beautiful articles of clothing! With the armorial bookplate of Earl Fitzwilliam (William Wentworth) and the old inscription on the title page Ex Libris Societatis Medical Edincinsis. The title seems to be getting scarcer as at the time of cataloguing there was not a copy on the internet.