Mr Wills (not his real name) owned an antiquarian bookshop in one of the up-market malls in Rosebank, Johannesburg in the 1980’s. He was a quirky, bad-tempered Englishman who made you quake if you set foot in his shop but his books were superlative. One just knew that books this beautiful had to be rare books.
Take for instance the account, with illustrations, of two Dutch explorers in the 17th century, Ensigns Bergh and Schrijver, into the hinterland of what is now South Africa.
To put that in perspective: that was so long ago in human history that the black speakers of Bantu languages had not yet come down the African Continent to South Africa. The Europeans had yet to arrive in force. The region was sparsely populated only by the copper-skinned hunting-and-gathering aborigines, the Khoi and Khoisan.
The explorers kept copious journals that are now kept in the Cape Archives. In 1931 Dr E.E. Mossop wrote a book, based on his translation of these journals, entitled Journals of the Expeditions of the Honourable Ensign Olof Bergh (1682 and 1683) and the Ensign Isaq Schrijver (1689). Today copies of Mossop’s book rate as rare pieces of Africana, although they do come on onto the book market from time to time.
I remember Mr Wills showing me this book but not allowing me to touch it. It was a rare book, he explained. And so the idea of a rare book was formed in my mind. “Hand-scribed Byzantine tomes are rare. Gutenberg Press books are rare. Self-published Victorian tomes are rare,” I thought. I was confident that I knew what a rare book was when we started our bookshop deep in the country, quite near where Schrijver penetrated the mountains for the first time.
Then Mr Besant (not his real name) came asking for a book called A Colossus of Roads by Pat Storrar and G
Tags: antiquarian books, book, hard to find books, rare books
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