Australasian pocket almanack, for the year of Our Lord 1824 ; HOWE, Robert (compiler and printer)

being Bissextile, or Leap Year ; and the fifth of the Reign of His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Fourth. Published, under the sanction and patronage of His Excellency Sir Thomas Brisbane, K.C.B. &c. &c. &c.New South Wales: Compiled and printed, at Sydney, by Robert Howe, Government Printer. Sydney : Robert Howe, [1824]. Duodecimo (175 x 120 mm), contemporary papered boards (rubbed and lightly marked), expertly rebacked preserving remnants of the original paper with black-lettered title; marbled endpapers, recto of first blank with the original owner's name 'Berry & Wollstonecraft' inscribed in ink; pp. [2] (blank), iv, 164; with the folding plate 'A Table Shewing the several Positions of the Vanes of the Telegraph'; several annotations in ink in the personnel list sections; pale water stain to bottom edge of the plate, but otherwise a fine, crisp example, printed on laid paper. This early Sydney almanac was published on New Year's Day, 1824. As advertised in the Sydney Gazette (16 December 1823), the present example was one of a presumably smaller number of higher-grade copies that were printed on laid paper and priced at three rupees; copies on 'inferior' paper cost six shillings. In addition to the standard calendrical information, tables of weights and measures, etc., the almanac contains numerous sections which illuminate the state of society in Sydney and the greater colony of New South Wales at the time. These include: Established Police Regulations for the Town of Sydney;Port Regulations; Proclamation, By His Excellency Sir Thomas Brisbane, Relative to Profanation of the Sabbath; a number of Government and General Orders; Reduced Rate of Tolls over the South Creek, Windsor; Observations on the Garden and the Field(a lengthy article of 30 pages); and lists of personnel in The Police Establishment, Sydney,The Marine Establishment, Sydney, TheCivil Establishment at the Settlements of Van Diemen's Land, and TheMilitary Establishment in the Territory of New South Wales and its Dependencies. The original owner of this particular copy was the firm of BerryandWollstonecraft, a commercial partnership formed in 1819 between AlexanderBerryand EdwardWollstonecraft. The business had its headquarters in George Street, Sydney but its extensive interests -chiefly in the cedar and tobacco industries, for which it relied on convict labour -were centred in the Shoalhaven district. Ferguson, 930 (not noting the folding plate)