District Six (signed and numbered 1986 limited edition)

This copy (Number 429, signed by Adam Small in red on the title-page) is especially collectable as it was one of two found last year among the books in the Cape Town estate of Joanna Marx, one of South Africa's leading conservationists and the person who in 1985 found Wissema's negatives in a shoebox. (See below.) It is unmarked except for the book number and Small's signature and it remains in excellent condition.

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.

From the back cover: "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 photographer Jansje Wissema to make a record 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 Her portfolio has become one of South Africa's most poignant historical documents, but because she died soon after completing the commission it [had not until then] been published."

Three-colour laminated white card covers; plain black endpapers; 12 pp of grey matt stock with prelims and poetry by Adam Small; 32 pp of heavy art paper with 73 of Wissema's pictures reproduced as sepia duotones.

The book's other substantial contributors were Willem Jordaan, the designer, and Alain Proust, a photographer then 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 unnoticed in a shoebox for nearly twenty years.

[Many of the original large Wissema-Proust prints made for the book are now in the National Gallery.]