The Algoa Gazetteer

4to; original red rexine, lettered in gilt on spine and upper cover; pp. xiv + 666. Boards bumped; earlier owners' hand-stamp to front free endpaper, with mounted newspaper clippings related to the book's release to both recto and verso; some foxing to edges and occasionally elsewhere. Good condition.

An uncommon work of huge significance to students of Eastern Cape history. Besides South African repositories, OCLC finds only the Yale copy. There is an amazing prescience to Jack Skead's preface, given the wholesale re-naming of towns in the Eastern Cape province.

"The genesis of any placename seldom arises from deliberate thought or choice: it happens when some trivial incident occurs at some insignificant place, perhaps from nothing more exciting than the shooting of a rogue baboon in a patch of bush or the drowning of a pet horse at a drift. For a time the name Bobbejaansbos or Paarde Drift is on everyone's lips and may survive for half a century without anyone having described the incident in print to give hope of survival to a name which today we would like to have explained. Instead, such names pass into limbo and their impact is lost. Conversely, many a name with little to recommend it survives for no obvious reason. … The task of a gazetteer-compiler is unending. New placenames come into currency constantly, at no time more than the present when South Africa's human populations are on the move as never before and with many new placenames being coined almost monthly when new townships arise from squatter elements. How many such names will survive? How many will fade into obscurity? And, perhaps of greater importance, how many familiar placenames in the whiteman's tradition will find themselves reverting to their original indigenous titles?"