On the Mines

This was David Goldblatt's first book, which he also designed.

He begins his acknowledgments with this tribute to his co-author: "Nadine Gordimer had a part in the making of my Witwatersrand photographs long before I met her. Her first book, 'Face to Face', which I read in 1950, made explicit for me, to the point of pungency, my own then vagueness of our milieu. And over the years, as I sought expression in photography, her writing came to be particularly relevant: challenging, affirming, always extending my understanding of what we both so often seemed to find significant."

The unclipped dustjacket, which has been well repaired with archival tape, is rubbed along all the edges, but without affecting the photographs on both covers. The maroon cloth-boards, gilt to the spine, are fine. The plain free endpapers are sunned in register with the jacket flaps. The binding is tight. The endpapers and the 136 pp of unpaginated text and 56 b/w photographs, five of which were first published in "Optima", are fine and unmarked and, except for the endpaper sunning noted above, undiscoloured.

This is a very good copy of a justly famous and now 40-year-old book.