Jock of the Bushveld

Longmans, Green, and Co, London, New York, Bombay & Calcutta., 1907. Cloth. Condition: Very good. Illustrated by E. Caldwell. With 23 full page plates and numerous b/w vignettes within text and to margins. (illustrator). Very good. Publishers teal cloth with gilt lettering and vignette to front and spine. Endpapers and page edges foxed. No inscriptions. A very nice copy. xv, 474pp. Size: 8vo. 8 1/2". First printing. On pages 65, 337 and 457 the drawings of a dung beetle show him pushing with his front legs and on page 316, a horse is shown trying to get up a vertical bank. These inaccuracies were changed in subsequent editions. Binding is a little shaken with slight wear to the spine ends.

Jock of the Bushveld is a true story by South African author Sir James Percy FitzPatrick.The book tells of FitzPatrick's travels with his dog, Jock, a Staffordshire Bull Terrier cross, during the 1880s, when he worked as a storeman, prospector's assistant, journalist and ox-wagon transport-rider in the Bushveld region of the Transvaal (then the South African Republic).

FitzPatrick later recounted these adventures as bedtime stories to his four children. Rudyard Kipling, a good friend of FitzPatrick, also took part in these story-telling evenings and eventually persuaded him to collect these tales in book form.[6] Jock of the Bushveld was first published in 1907 and had an extremely warm reception, being reprinted four times in that year alone. Since then it has achieved the status of a classic South African book and has been also widely read abroad - more than one hundred editions have been printed and it has been translated into Afrikaans, Dutch, French, Xhosa and Zulu, amongst others. Illustrations for the book were done by Edmund Caldwell,[4] a brother of Mary Tourtel, creator of Rupert Bear.