MEMORIES, MINES AND MILLIONS

First Edition: 248 pages, frontispiece portrait,  many full-page and other illustrations, including five high-quality tipped-in monochrome photographic portraits, red cloth titled gilt on the upper cover, the spine is faded and has no titling, slight foxing on the top edge, a very good copy.

Leo Weinthal (1865–1930) was a prominent South African journalist, writer and newspaper proprietor. Born in Graaff-Reinet, he studied in Hamburg and at the Grey Institute in Port Elizabeth before moving to the Transvaal in 1887. He became principal agent for Reuters in the Transvaal (1888–1897), edited The Press in Pretoria from 1891, and in 1898 founded the Pretoria News. During the Anglo-Boer War he served as a war correspondent for American newspapers.

Critically, Weinthal had a direct business relationship with J.B.Robinson (3rd August 1840 to 30th October 1929). The book was published in 1929, the year of Robinson's death. It was clearly produced as a commemorative volume, either at Robinson's behest or with his family's authorisation, while he was still alive or immediately after his death, so the treatment of his subject is hagiographic. The appendices trumpet Robinson's mining successes and dividend records. It omits, for example, Robinson's 1921 conviction for fraud (he was £500,000, a huge amount for the time) and the Honours Scandal of 1922, in which he paid £30,000 to political fixer Maundy Gregory for a peerage, only to be forced to decline it after King George V personally objected, a scandal that contributed to the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. It is useful for its first hand detail on early Kimberley and the Rand, its contemporary illustrations, and its statistical appendices, but unreliable as an impartial assessment of Robinson's character or business ethics. (Wikepedia, Jeremy Lawrence, Buccaneer: A Biography of Sir Joseph Benjamin Robinson, First Baronet (The Gryphon Press, 2001), and other sources).

Lawrence (Jeremy) Buccaneer; a biography of Sir Joseph Benjamin Robinson page 364, 'On the red spine on some copies of Memories, Mines and Millions there was no lettering. It has been alleged that this was not a printing fault but a deliberate device that would allow the owner of a copy to keep it on his library shelf without visitors being aware of the book's identity.