District Six (1986)

Always a pleasure to find an excellent copy of first edition of a book one published oneself 25 years ago but has not seen for some time. The 2004 reprint had a stight red cast to the duotone cover illustration, which should have been clean sepia as in the first edition.

The book celebrates the last days of Cape Town\'s famous District Six before a 1966 proclamation in terms of the Group Areas Act reserved the area for \"white ownership and occupation\", thus ending the life of one of the liveliest parts of the city. (Many living today still have memories of the bustle, noise and cheerfulness. My own first was in the 1950s when I took a three-piece leather \"lounge suite\" there to be restored.)

From the blub: \"Recognising that District Six was not only a vital community but contained architecture abounding with felicities and of great historical importance, the Cape Provincial Institute of Architects commissioned Dutch-Born Jansje Wissema . . . to make a recod of the buildings, street life and people of the area. Her portfolio has become one of South Africa\'s most poignant historical documents, but because she died soon after completing the commission it has not until now been published . . . \"

The three-colour laminated heavy paper covers are creased in two places and the insides are sunned towards the edges. The plain black endpapers are as new. The 12 pp of grey matt stock, containing the prelims and poetry by Adam Small, are in perfect condition, as are the 32 pp of heavy art paper carrying 73 of Wissema\'s pictures, uncaptioned and reproduced as sepia duotones.

The book\'s other substantial contributors were Willem Jordaan, the designer, and Alain Proust, newly arrived in South Africa from France, who was able to release the beauty of Wissema\'s images from negatives that were typically nearly opaque or nearly transparent - Wissema did not use a light-meter with her Rolleiflex, which is why her negatives went almost unnoticed in a shoebox for twenty years.