Dear Collector
This month’s newsletter is exciting for several reasons. Firstly, we’re pleased to announce the launch of our new website, which you can view here:http://www.christison.co.za. The site has a number of features, including its own search facility which is not reliant on an external listing site, a secure payment arrangement, and an archive of newsletters. We hope you will find it appealing.
Secondly, we have divided the latest acquisitions into two sections. One part, viewable at http://www.antiquarianauctions.com/sellers/chri
stison-rare-books, lists over thirty titles we are currently auctioning. These books will remain available for bidding until next Thursday evening. The undoubted highlights are:
• The five volumes of James Sowerby’s British Mineralogy with their fabulous hand-coloured plates. Sowerby’s is considered the most magnificent colourplate work on minerals ever produced.
• The four-volume Icones orchidearum Austro-Africanarum extra-tropicarum, by Harry Bolus, surely among the most striking botanical monographs to come out of our region.
• Several books from the collection of Dr Tielman Jooste, whose lifelong interest in the Anglo-Boer War has resulted in a library particularly strong in titles reflecting Republican sympathies. We have dispersed many of Dr Jooste’s books over recent years, and there will no doubt be more to come. Some of these items are obscure, so we recommend that you take advantage of this rare opportunity.
If you wish to bid, and have not already registered with Antiquarian Auctions, try to do so fairly soon, because bidding can become quite frenetic on the final afternoon of the sale.
The second section of our list comprises items we are selling outright. Among the highlights is an early Zulu New Testament, produced
by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1872. There are also several unpublished dissertations on the troubled political history of our country. These take one back to an era when South Africans were beset by a sense of isolation. Fortunately, from the mid-1950s onward, boys growing up in South Africa were able to escape their country’s seclusion through the adventures of Fritz Deelman of the Suid-Afrikaanse Veiligheidspolisie. Fritz Deelman travels to South America and the Himalayas, to the Sahara and the bottom of the Ocean, to the South Pole and Mars. You could say that the author Leon Rousseau (one half of the publishing house Human & Rousseau) indulged in vanity publishing to produce the eight books in the series. On the other hand, the titles have seen three Afrikaans editions, and have been translated, so the ‘vanity’ was justified. They’re wonderful books, and we have seven of them this month.
Best wishes
Lindsay and Wendy