REMINISCENCES OF KIMBERLEY

First edition: 436 pages, original purple cloth, titled gilt on the upper cover and spine, PRESENTATION COPY stamped at the bottom corner of the title page, a very good copy. 

Louis Cohen was a colourful figure of the Kimberley diamond-rush era, variously described as a journalist, diamond buyer and stockbroker and a cousin of the mining magnate Barney Barnato. His memoirs drew on decades spent among the diggers, dealers and speculators of the early diamond fields, and were written in a gossipy, score-settling style that named names and aired old grievances from the rough-and-tumble Kimberley of the 1870s–1880s.

The book's frank and unflattering portrait of Sir Joseph Benjamin Robinson, 1st Baronet (1840–1929), one of the "Randlords" and a major Kimberley and Rand mining magnate known in his day as "the Buccaneer", alleged, in substance, that Robinson's fortune and career had been built on fraud and swindling. Robinson sued both Cohen and his publisher for libel and won: Cohen was ordered to pay him £1,000 in damages, and the publisher a further £100. Following the judgment the book was withdrawn from sale, and the publisher is said to have destroyed the bulk of the remaining stock. Cohen was subsequently declared bankrupt as a result. 

Mendelssohn (Sidney) South African Bibliography volume 1 page 351: 'The author remarks that he "will attempt to describe men and things" as he had known and seen them "for the last thirty-five years", and those who lived amongst the scenes he depicts can testify to the general accuracy of the vivid pictures he has drawn of the early days of the Diamond Fields. Many of the character sketches are written in an extremely caustic manner, and many of the African magnates are handled in a somewhat rougher manner than is generally accorded to these favourites of fortune'.