Ebes-Douwma Antique Prints and Maps

09/07/2024

09/07/2024

25/10/2021

Without the printing press we would all be as ignorant as the masses in the 15 th century. In those days books were written by hand on vellum sheets. Took a flock of sheep to create one book for the rich and religious. Gutenberg altered a wine press to print with , cast individual letters from lead , tin and antimony and used paper sheets that were made in China and made it to Europe with the Moors via the Middle East and Spain. He then printed copies of the Bible. 50 years later print shops were established in most European countries .

11/09/2018

On my last day in Holland a week ago I stumbled accidentally into a committee meeting of the Abel Tasman Museum in Lutjegast Groningen , his birthplace in 1603. He went on to discover Tassie, New Zealand and Tongatabu as well as sighting Fiji before heading home in 1643 to prepare for his exploration of the North coast of Oz in 1644.
During my active years selling historic engravings of Australia’s history I came across material about Abel Tasman regularly. So for those of you interested in the history of this famous Dutchman who beat Cook to it by 138 years go visit the Lutjegast Museum if you happen to be in Holland...

16/06/2018

Always good to see recent results of auction sales world wide confirming that Art in almost every form is not only good for the souls and a pleasure for the eye but a great investment as well unlike a vintage car or something truly obscene like a bitcoin representing value on the internet only. Audubon is the American equivalent of our John Gould . The difference being that Audubon’s colour printed engravings are twice the size as Gould’s hand coloured Stone Lithographs and at least ten times the co$t😄.

03/05/2018

When I took over the Australian Print Gallery from fellow Dutchman Robert Douwma in 1979/80 I fell in love with a couple of birds , illustrated in his catalogue , by John Gould that hadn’t been sold . One of them was the original art work by Gould of two hummingbirds with annotations in pencil from the series he produced and the other the hand coloured lithograph. There are slight differences between the two images where he used herring scales with gold to colour their crowns and of course the printing process reversed their original positions.
That was the beginning of a long association with the famous John Gould , the Bird Man.

02/05/2018

The earliest type of printing was Intaglio, rubbing ink into the grooves of an engraved or etched plate and running it with a sheet of paper on top between two metal rollers to copy the image. In the late 18th century a chemical process allowed Senefelder from Solnhofen , Germany, to copy music sheets from a litho stone drawn upon with crayon , and inked with a roller after the stone was wiped with water. Lithography was born! The third method was Letterpress printing also invented in Germany by Gutenberg using movable individual letters made of lead , tin and antimony . Thousands of letters were cast for every type face in fonts and kept in type cases as required. Stanhope relinquished a patent on his press and in the early 1900’s dozens of metal presses were created such as the Columbian by Clymer with the bold Eagle on top as a counterweight and the so called Albion presses invented by Cope. They were embellished with artistic designs because printing was then an Art form that became a trade with Offset printing and is now a science produced by computers that can print the spoken word literally as fast as it can be dictated in any style , type or language.This post will be printed in a hard copy book for my library as soon as I have posted enough sentiment to fill 450 pages and I order it from the printer in Amsterdam using Facebook for the text and FedEx to deliver it in less than a week from order.
Still boggles my mind when I leaf through an incunable book from 1495 knowing how it was created then from the relics of the past in my library.....Thank you Mr. Gutenberg.

02/05/2018

When I was a crop duster in the Victorian countryside of Australia I relished my visits to the local printing offices of the towns I was staying in when the inclement weather prohibited me from flying a few feet off the crops killing bugs or weeds.
The local printers were always a wealth of knowledge about the history of the area and the people who lived there , and like me they never threw away anything they might need after a nuclear war. Like a hand operated printing press or two and dozens of type faces in metal and wood just in case all electricity failed... Then one day I was offered all the old stuff from one country press in Rutherglen where time had stood still , that changed over to offset printing in a larger town and so I bought the building as well and that started a decade or more of collecting antique printing equipment from dozens of shops in and around Victoria in the 60’s. I still live with them. Majestic , beautiful , heavy hand operated machines dating back to the early 1800’s when the Earl of Stanhope invented the first iron press in 1798 , a vast improvement on the old wooden presses that changed little since Gutenberg invented it in 1450. Machines we owe a big debt to for educating the masses.

02/05/2018

When I bought the magnificent 1830 Columbian Eagle printing press at an auction in Adelaide about 30 years ago, I also stumbled on a large number of Movie Posters from the 50’s and 60’s that were lithographed in Sydney. They advertised some blockbuster movies in theatres all over Australia and some quite forgettable ones. But the posters a brilliant. Some great collectables and some are interesting wallpaper. Depends on your taste. Some are rare and others came in multiples. From Bardot to Churchill and the Carry on gang to Sci Fi. Hundreds of different films... Available whole sale only by Appointment.
0419 329 886. Hank Ebes.

02/05/2018

The first of the so called FIRST FLEET BOOKS were published in England by Governor Arthur Phillip, Surgeon John White ,David Collins and John Hunter. They featured the earliest flora and fauna as well as engravings of the landscape, aboriginal population , images of their voyage and views of Sydney and Tasmania dating back as early as 1789. Hundreds of these original hand coloured engravings are available whole sale and by Appointment only on 0419 329 886. Hank Ebes.

01/05/2018

For about three decades until the late 80’s Alecto Historical Editions in London produced a remarkable volume of the most magnificent antique engravings , re-strikes from the original copper plates belonging to various Museums . Six of the surviving copper plates from 1838 of the Elephant folio sized Birds of America by Audubon were reproduced exactly like the originals in A La Poupé colour in 1985. Five of these in their original size of 29.5X43.5 inches are available as well as one original proof plate in B/W. Three are in my livingroom framed in birds eye maple.

01/05/2018

30 YEARS AGO today, in 1988 to celebrate the bi- centennial of Australia, I decided to auction a full set of the entire Banks -Cook-Parkinson 1768-1771 FLORILEGIUM engravings both in Sydney and in Melbourne in collaboration with
Alecto Historical Editions who with the British Museum owned original copper engravings Re Struck the entire collection in A La Poupé colour . I also published a two hundred page soft cover catalogue of every one of the 738 engravings. In addition , it also illustrates every publication of these priceless original works from the James Britten lithographs to the historically unique illustrations from the 1771 first edition of The Voyage of Capt. Cook by John Hawksworth
Published in 1771. A number of these original catalogues with the CD about the voyage and the Alecto publication process narrated by Robert Hughes are still available as well as hundreds of the original Alecto engravings from two of the 100 LTD edition sets produced in the 1980’s .