The Peter Crossing Collection. An Illustrated Catalogue. By David J.Mabberley. Privately published in 2022 by Peter Crossing AM, 345 pp., illustrated throughout. <scp>ISBN</scp> 978–0–6485982‐1‐3

This most handsome book is a record of the Natural History library of Peter Crossing, the Australian investment banker and philanthropist. In the foreword, Crossing describes how he became fascinated by early Australian illustrated plant and animal books and how he started his collection, which concentrates on books with an Australian connection, published before the accession of Queen Victoria. An early acquisition was the Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae painted and engraved by Ferdinand Bauer, published in 1813–1816; as well as being perhaps the most beautiful of all Australian illustrated botanical books, Peter Crossing's copy is extra-special, recognised by David Mabberley to have been the personal copy belonging to Aylmer Bourke Lambert, a connoisseur who had a keen interest in Australia and was author of the great Monograph of the genus Pinus (1803–1807 and 1828). Though Ferdinand Bauer is best known for his paintings of Australian plants and for the illustrations in Sibthorp's Flora Graeca, Peter Crossing's library contains another book illustrated mainly by Bauer, John Lindley's monograph of foxgloves Digitalium monographia, published in 1821. Mabberley gives not only the history of the plates in the book and the origin of the specimens on which they were based, but a note on the publisher and his successors at 4 York St., Covent Garden. It is Professor David Mabberley's essays on Bauer's works and on all the other books that make this so much more than a catalogue, indeed it is a work of true scholarship; each entry is fascinating, with information on the illustrations, the details of publication, former owners of the volumes and even on some of the bookplates, not to mention some of the prices the books fetched at auctions in the past. One of Mabberley's interests is to find the connections between the books, their authors and other well-known public figures of the time, rich patrons, scientists, artists, horticulturists and explorers; as he explains in the introduction, even Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon are mentioned. But Peter Crossing's is not only a collection of antiquarian books, it also includes journals, letters, medals, individual paintings, an engraving by George Cruikshank of a black swan. Modern fine illustrated books on the Australian flora are included, such as Charlene Garry's Basilisk Press publication in 1976 of some hitherto unpublished paintings, entitled The Australian Flower Paintings of Ferdinand Bauer, and edited by Professor William Stearn. A more recent, even more splendid book is The Banksias, an elephant folio, published in three volumes between 1982 and 2000, with paintings by Celia Rossiter and text by Alex George; William Stearn spoke very highly of these paintings, comparing them with the work of Ferdinand Bauer. One warning to readers: the index, as it does explain in small print, is to Dramatis Personae, and to catalogue number rather than page number; there does not appear to be an index of titles, but the catalogue is chronological, beginning with no. 1, John Ray's Historium plantarum generalis published between 1693 and 1704, and no. 2 William Dampier's A voyage to New Holland, &c. in the year 1699, published in 1703 and ending with recent paintings by artists Susannah Blaxill (Doryanthes excelsa) and, no 169, a monumental, life-size Doryanthes palmeri inflorescence by Beverly Allen, painted at Hunters Hill in New South Wales, and completed in 2022 (also shown as a full-page frontispiece). This book is privately published and not readily available, though occasional copies may come up at auction. An earlier book based on Peter Crossing's collection is Botanical Revelation: European encounters Australian plants before Darwin. The Peter Crossing Collection, by David Mabberley, published by NewSouth, Sydney in 2019; it is listed by several specialist booksellers, both in Australia and Europe.