The Victoria gold ready reckoner,

carefully revised. Commencing at £3 and terminating at £4. 5s 9d per ounce. Melbourne: Sands and McDougall, 1878. Fifth edition. Sextodecimo (110 x 73 mm), original blind-embossed brown cloth over boards with gilt lettering to upper board (boards rubbed, spine slightly rolled and ends a little frayed); front pastedown with early ownership inscription of ‘A. E. Baker, “Oaklands”, Omeo’, salmon-coloured endpapers; pp. 218; occasional spotting, but clean and sound throughout; an extremely good example of this miner’s portable working guide to values, which would have been carried on the goldfields.

The Victoria Gold Ready Reckoner was first published by Sands & Kenny in 1857. Upon dissolution of the partnership of John Sands and Thomas Kenny in 1861, Sands formed a partnership with Dugald McDougall; Victoria Ready Reckoners were subsequently published in the 1860s and 70s bearing the imprint of Sands & McDougall.

Any edition of the Gold Ready Reckoner with the Sands & Kenny or Sands & McDougall imprint can be considered rare, with some only known in a single example.

This diminutive publication, one of only a few recorded copies, is something of a nugget in itself – an ephemeral personal artefact from a prospector in the Australian gold rush of the nineteenth century.

Trove locates only three copies of the fifth edition (NLA; SLV; NMA Research Library). The NLA’s cataloguing note testifies to the ephemeral nature and often heavy practical use to which these small miner’s tools would generally have been subjected – a factor which makes this example, once owned by a miner in East Gippsland, an exceptional survivor in terms of its superior condition: “National Library of Australia’s SR copy is missing its free front endpaper and title page. It was found in an old house known as the ‘undertaker’s cottage’ in Nundle, NSW, by Brenda Piper (later Hodgkinson) in 1959, and is accompanied by a small black and white photograph (image size 40 x 55 mm) depicting the cottage.”