Vintage Books and Back Issues of Magazines

Here's a great story for anyone who is interested in vintage books. Mr. Peabody (not his real name) owned an antiquarian  bookshop in the town of Rosebank, Johannesburg in the 1980’s. A quirky, easily irritated Englishman who made you sweat if you set foot in his shop to view his vintage books were superlative.  One just knew that books this unusual and beautiful had to be rare finds.
Take for example the vintage book of illustrations of two Dutch explorers in the 17th century of the hinterland of what is now South Africa. To put that in perspective: that was so long ago that black speakers of Bantu languages had not yet come down the African continent to South Africa. The Europeans had yet to arrive in force.

The explorers kept copious journals that are now kept in the Cape Archives. In 1931 Dr E.E. Mossop wrote a book, based on his translation of these journals, which he entitled The Journals of the Expeditions of the Honourable Ensign Olof Bergh (1682 and 1683) and the Ensign Isaq Schrijver (1689). In today’s market the few remaining copies of Mossop’s book rate as rare pieces of Africana, and they come on onto the vintage books market from time to time.

Find Vintage Books Here

I remember Mr. Peabody showing me this book but absolutely forbidding me to touch it. It was a rare book, he explained.

And thus my interest in vintage books was formed in my mind. Hand-scribed Byzantine tomes are rare. Gutenberg Press books are certainly rare.  Self-published Victorian tomes are also rare.

I was pretty confident that I understood what vintage books wer when we started our bookshop deep in the country, quite close to where Schrijver penetrated the mountains for the first time.

Then Mrs. Holanewt (not his real name) came asking for a book called A Colossus of Roads by Pat Storrar and Günther Komnick which had been published in 1984 by Murray & Roberts, a South African construction and concrete firm, Concor.

The subject of the book is the road passes built through the Great Rift mountains stretching along the eastern and southern sections of the country, written by an intrepid visionary by the name of Thomas Charles John Bain (1830-1893). His road works still exist in all their daring glory.  Whereas the earlier travelers clambered over mountains to explore the interior, Thomas Bain built lasting thoroughfares through mountain passes painfully hacked into the mountainsides while he lived in remote areas to complete his work.

Mrs. Holanewt had been searching for this book for a very long time. I assured her that it would not be difficult to find. and put out the word to the South African Booksellers  . I asked her to keep her cell phone switched on. It would take no more than an hour to locate, I said.  I own a signed copy of The Colossus of Roads. How hard could it be to find?

Well, five months later I called Mrs. Holanewt on her mobile with the good news that I had finally located a copy!  Frankly, I was surprised it took so long to locate this book.
Why hadn’t I call it a rare book? Something told me it would be sacrilege to place this book, as interesting as it is, alongside books as special and rare as the rare piece of Africana in Mr. Peabody’s antiquarian book shop.

Hard to Find and Vintage Books

Some semantic significance is attached to word rare for us all. “Hard-to-find” apparently means a more recent book that was under-published in error or so popular that no one wants to place their copies in the secondhand market.  The label “rare” is applied to book over a hundred years old for which one feels an intuitive veneration.  Whereas the term vintage books is more subjective and  applies to any books which are old and often collectible.

The difference is spurious, really, now that online bookstores are bringing elusive and obscure books within reach of everyone. Now, as a matter of principle,  I mix these terms freely and use them interchangeably.

True, it can be difficult to locate a  rare, hard to find and vintage books. But wouldn’t you expect it to be?  And hard-to-find books are rare books, even on the internet.  That’s why they are hard-to-find!  Try shopping on the English Newsletter to find the vintage books and back issues of magazines you are looking for.