Timber and Tides : the Story of Knysna and Plettenberg Bay by Tapson, Winifred

Signed by the Author on the Title page.

Timber and Tides : the Story of Knysna and Plettenberg Bay by Tapson, Winifred

Hardcover, ISBN 9780702104558
Publisher: Juta, 1973

Condition:  Good. This book is in good condition. The DJ has some limited signs of wear and tear and the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. The first page have some minor wear to the edges (see pics) and wear to the board edges but this book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. The book is protected with a Cellophane cover.

For its size, Knysna is probably the best-known place in South Africa. It is known, however vaguely, as a town built upon the shores of a lagoon of breathtaking beauty; as the home of stinkwood furniture, and as the place where an Englishman named George Rex, allegedly the son of King George III and the Quaker, Hannah Lightfoot, settled at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

But there is much more to Knysna than even this, a whole treasury of fact about the men and women of its past which the author has so painstakingly unearthed and which she presents with a nice sense of humour. Plettenberg Bay, now the playground of tourists, was the precursor of Knysna as a port for shipping much-needed timber from the forests to Cape Town.

Primarily this is a book about the ships that plied to and from Knysna, and the men who sailed them. In none of the chapters in this fascinating book, whether on forestry, or the long-forgotten Millwood goldfields, or the elephant hunts, or the ancestry of George Rex, does the author fail to bring to light new evidence which transforms her subject. The book is embellished by the delightful sketches of LENG DIXON, as well as twelve pages of illustrations.