African Portraits. Paul Kruger, Cecil Rhodes and Matabele (1946)

Although not up to the standard of books we normally sell, this item is offered in an overall less than good condition because of the value of its subject-matter and because it is now scarce. Its jacket has been repaired and the book is now better than a reading copy.

As the blurb has it: \"The scene is South Africa. Perhaps nowhere else in history have three such contrasting types of human culture been so perfectly embodied in three men, all living at the same time and hoping to occupy the same land.\"

Cloete himself writes: \"All this [his descent and the people he knew and had met] gives me no particular authority, but it gave me both the cause and the desire to write. The men of whom I write are known to me by hearsay, by having met men who knew them, by knowing their descendants and by the fact that I write of the land that Rhodes called \'My North\', of the Transvaal and of Africa.\"

The two-colour printed dustjacket, not price-clipped (12s 6d), is extensively torn and chipped but has been repaired. The black cloth-boards are sunned at the spine in register with the dustjacket damage, but the corners are unbumped and the cloth still feels soft. The binding has loosened slightly with a crack near the back, but remains sound. There is the same map on both endpapers. There is an ink signature and a few other words on the front paste-down, which also features the bookplate of Leopold G Bland. The half-title leaf is creased. There are notes in pencil on the verso of the back free endpaper. The 480 pp of text, appendixes and index are in generally very good condition, although pp 110-111 are browned from the presence of loose newspaper cuttings.