1899 Rare Africana Book - Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp a tale of Transvaal officialdom
(description)
Author : Erasmus, Sarel (Pseudonym Of Douglas Blackburn)
Title : Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp a tale of Transvaal officialdom;being incidents in the life of a Transvaal official, as told by his son-in-law Sarel Erasmus, late Public Prosecutor of Prinsloosdorp, Market Master of Kaalkop, Small-pox Tax Collector of Schoonspruit, etc., etc.
Publisher : London and South Africa, Dunbar Bros., 1st Edition, undated but 1899 (PULS) (1898 DSAB)
Language : Text in English
Size : 7.5 " X 5 "
Pages : X-129 pages.
Binding : Very good and very attractive decorated cloth binding (hinges fine, overall slightly worn and scuffed) under a protective removable mylar cover.
Content : Very good content (bright, tight and clean) With the pasted slip to title page: “Copies of this and all other publications by Messrs. Dunbar Bros. can only be obtained from H. MacLeay, London, Cape Town and Johannesburg.”
The book : Rare and attractive edition of one of the rarest satirical books from the days of the Transvaal republic. An anti-Boer satirical sketch. he book takes the form of a biography of Piet Prinsloo, a voortrekker from the Cape Colony, who goes through the mill of Transvaal officialdom from Field Cornet to Mining Commissioner, is the fortunate vendor of a gold farm and the founder of the dorp that bears his name. The author, who knows the dorp, Pretoria, and the Rand equally well, gives us a delightfully vivid and humorous picture of the ways that are dark and the tricks that are not always vain of slim Piet and his congeners, and, altogether, has produced the truest and best Transvaal sketch we have yet seen.` From a contemporary Transvaal newspaper review.
Copies of the first edition were bought up and destroyed by the Transvaal Republican government, apparently with a view to its suppression.
The author: Douglas Blackburn (6 August 1857, Southwark – 28 March 1929, Tonbridge) was an English journalist and novelist, who worked in the Transvaal and Natal between 1892 and 1908. He has been called "the great chronicler of the last days of the Boer republic."