One Only

In her book on The Life of Herman Charles Bosman (Human & Rousseau, Cape Town) Valerie Rosenberg writes (p 138):

• "In late 1942 Bosman's friend Arthur Markowitz introduced him to a man by the name of Mikel Goldin, a Jewish merchant who claimed to be a deep thinker and who was looking for a literary gentleman to ghost-write a book on his philosophy. Bosman, still struggling to make ends meet and glad of anything that would bring in some money, agreed to perform the task. The tome duly appeared under the title One Only."

We have been unable to trace another copy of the book. Google has nothing on Mikel Goldin, or a New Era Publications or an Express Printing Works operating in Johannesburg in the 1940s. 

The last line of the dedication - "and to all those who have lost their honour and are languishing in prisons" - certainly sounds like Bosman. 

The wide-ranging chapter titles - Educational Psychology, Medicine and its Applications, Racial and National Differences, A Plea for Humanity, and many others - indicate a broad philosophy. The writer of the words "I claim to have discovered the root of the trouble with which the human race is afflicted . . . [and people] have invariably declared that I am the only one from whom they have ever heard these views" either had a sense of humour (Bosman, claimed Rosenberg) or a high opinion of himself. 

It seems unlikely that a merchant or businessman, especially one who wrote "I am not a writer" in the first line of the Foreword, would have had the literary skill to have written this book, so the attribution to Bosman seems quite probable, although we can find it nowhere else except in Rosenberg's book. It seems likely that Goldin wrote down or dictated the ideas in the book and also collected and offered his ghost-writer the clippings from Johannesburg newspapers that contribute to some of his arguments.

CONTENTS AND CONDITION. The brown cloth-boards, with black lettering and rules to the upper panel and spine, are sunned at the spine and lightly edge-rubbed. The plain endpapers are unmarked and unfoxed, though very lightly cracked. 469 pp of text, unmarked and undiscoloured. The page edges have a few foxing spots or other brown stains.

This may be a curiosity, but it is certainly a rare one.