Jock of the Bushveld

Longman, Green and Co. Ltd., London, 1943. E. Caldwell (illustrator). 475pp + xvi prelims. Original green cloth gilt with gilt antelope on spine. coloured cloth with embossed head of antelope on front cover and slightly faded gilt lettering on spine. Nick and crease to top of spine. Near fine pictorial dust jacket. Colour frontis plus 16 other full page illustrations all present. Numerous small line drawings. V attractive book. Special Complete School Edition.

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. 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, a brother of Mary Tourtel, creator of Rupert Bear.