The finest private collection of books relating to the polar explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton will come up at Sotheby’s in London on September 30. The auction is 100 years on from Shackleton’s epic “Endurance” expedition, considered the final great voyage of the “heroic” age of Antarctic exploration. Pioneering publishers and writers, they produced some of the most outstanding and rare of all travel books, recounting their great feats of adventure, ill-fated voyages, daily lives and discoveries in the South Pole.
Highlights including the first book printed in Antarctica, Shackleton’s Antarctic handbook and a facsimile of the South Polar Times (the newspaper produced by Scott’s men in the Antarctic). The collection is from the library of Franklin Brooke-Hitching. He has assembled the most magnificent private collection of English language books charting the discovery of the world over 40 years.
The motor car in soft snow after the return of the ship. (Taken during the British Antarctic Expedition 1907-1909.
The Hut in Summertime
National Antarctic Expedition 1901-1904. Album
Inscription in George Murray’s Antarctic Manual (1901)