Twelve Hundred Miles in a Waggon (1896)

Dedicated to "My Fellow-Travellers", Miss Balfour's book was, according to the Daily Chronicle's review of the first edition (published a year earlier), "Full of keen observation, of good stories and amusing experiences, and it is permeated throughout with a humour which, generally genial, is sometimes caustic, and which never fails to entertain the reader, as it obviously smoothed the difficult path of the writer." 

"The writer" was a sister of the then British Prime Minister.

Reviewing the facsimile edition published by Pioneer Head [this, of course, is a copy of the original], Mary Morison Webster, writing in in a 1971 issue of the Johannesburg Star (the clipping is a loose insert in this copy), noted: "Early Johannesburg (1894) fascinated them. 'At Johannesburg there are two absorbing topics of interest - gold-mining and politics. But more interesting even than gold-mining is the present state of politics in the Transvaal.'" [This was two years before the Jameson Raid.]

Maroon cloth-boards, with gilt ox-wagon vignette and rules to the upper panel and gilt lettering to the spine, top edge trimmed, other edges uncut, green printed endpapers, tissue-protected b/w frontispiece, xix (including preface) + 265 pp of text, profusely illustrated with full-page and smaller sketches by the author + inserted 3-fold 2-colour map + (2) + 32 pp of publishers' announcements. 

CONDITION. The boards are rubbed at the corners and spine-ends. New endpapers have been added to strengthen a spine-crack between the original front free endpaper and the half-title. There is a contemporary (May 1896) ownership signature on the half-title page. The contents, including the frontispiece tissue and the map and publisher's announcements, are complete, otherwise unmarked and undiscoloured, making this a collectible copy.