antiquarian bookseller - Peter Harrington

Peter Harrington Antiquarian Bookseller
73. MITFORD, Bertram.
Through the Zulu Country. Its
Battlefields and its People.
London, Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883 [39081] £1500
8vo. Original brown decorative cloth over bevelled boards.
Photogravure frontispiece and 4 other similar plates. Marginal
browning, some foxing, particularly to prelims and the foreedge,
modern bookplate to the front pastedown, hinges
repaired, but overall very good, the cloth a little rubbed, head
and tail of the spine crumpled and beginning to chip, short
split to the cloth at the head of the lower joint.
FIRST EDITION. Mitford travelled out to South Africa
in 1874 with the intention of becoming a stock farmer.
However, in 1878 he joined the Cape Civil Service as a clerk
and received a number of postings to border outposts. It
was during this period that he gathered a great deal of
first-hand material which he was to use to great effect
in his novels. For two years he was proprietor of the East
London Advertiser, 1886–8, but then turned seriously to
literature: in the following twenty-five years he wrote
some forty novels, mostly with South African settings.
The present work was the result of a solo trek undertaken
through Zulu country in 1882, “ … making the rounds of
the battlefields in succession … mixing with the people,
observing their character as well as manners and customs,
and gathering their opinion on the subject of the recent
campaign and other questions relating to themselves
and their national polity” (author’s Introduction). Seen as
Rider Haggard’s inferior in terms of novelistic skill, Mitford
has in more recent times been favourably compared to the
former for his sometimes ambiguous but generally more
sympathetic portrayal of the native peoples of South
Africa. An uncommon and desirable book, particularly so
in the cloth.
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Mendelssohn II, p.23.
74. MONTAGUE, William
Edward.
Campaigning in South Africa.
Reminiscences of an Officer in 1879.
Edinburgh and London, William Blackwood and Sons, 1880 [39084]
£1250
8vo. Original blue decorative cloth, title and pictorial roundels
gilt to the upper board, title in gilt to the spine. Light browning,
otherwise a very good copy, the cloth just a little rubbed at the
extremities, spine a touch tanned.
FIRST EDITION. Montague served in the Zulu War as
brigade major of the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Division, and
subsequently as Staff Officer Fort Marshall and to the
flying column in the operations against the hostile chiefs.
An attractive copy of an uncommon memoir.
Mendelssohn, II, p.40.
75. PARK, Mungo. Travels in
the Interior Districts of Africa:
performed under the direction
and patronage of the African
Association, in the years 1795,
1796, and 1797. With an appendix,
containing geographical illustrations
of Africa. By Major Rennell.
[Uniform with:] — The Journal of a
Mission to the Interior of Africa in
the year 1805. Together with other
documents, official and private,
relating to the same mission. To
which is prefixed an account of the
life of Mr. Park.
London, by W. Bulmer and Co. for the author; and sold by G. and W. Nicol;
[and] for John Murray, by W. Bulmer and Co., 1799 & 1815 [32438]
£3750
2 works in 2 volumes, 4to. Uniformly rebound to match in
diced calf, spines lettered and decorated gilt, covers with
double gilt rules enclosing Greek key border in blind, oneline
gilt panel inside with intersecting semi-circles at corners,
marbled endpapers, sprinkled edges. Fine stipple-engraved
portrait of Park by Dickinson after Henry Edridge, 3 engraved
maps (2 hand-coloured in outline) and 5 engraved plates in
first work; large folding map as frontispiece to second work.
Ownership ink-stamp and inscription cleaned from first title, a
little trivial dust-soiling internally, but an excellent set.
FIRST EDITION of both works. “Written in a
straightforward, unpretentious, narrative style, [Park’s
Travels] gave readers their first realistic description
of everyday life in west Africa, depicted without the
censorious, patronizing contempt which so often has
disfigured European accounts of Africa. For though
Park disliked what he perceived as the superstitions of
paganism and the bigotry of Islam, and regretted that
200 years of acquaintance with Europeans had left them
totally ignorant of Christianity, he presented the people
he met as people basically like himself” (ODNB). “Until
the publication of Park’s book in 1799 hardly anything
A classic of travel literature
was known of the interior of Africa, apart from the northeast
region and coastal areas … After the publication of
his book Park withdrew to a country medical practice at
Peebles. He soon got bored with the quiet life; and in 1805
he set out on another voyage to the Niger. This time he
actually travelled on the river in a canoe, hoping to follow
it to its mouth. But he met great hardships, lost a number
of his men … [and finally] perished in a fight with
natives. Fortunately, he had earlier sent back his journals
to Gambia and they formed the basis of a second account
of his voyages issued by the African Association … Park’s
Travels had an immediate success and was translated
into most European languages. It has become a classic
of travel literature, and its scientific observations on the
botany and meteorology of the region, and on the social
and domestic life of the Negroes, have remained of lasting
value. Park’s career was short but he made the first great
practical advance in the opening-up of Central Africa. Park
did not solve the problem of the Niger: he believed it to
be a tributary of the Nile or to be really identical with the
Congo; but he set the further exploration of the region in
the right direction” (PMM).
PMM 253.
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