Tony Grogan's Settler Country by Tony Grogan

Tony Grogan's Settler Country (First Edition in Illustrated Dust Jacket)

A Cape Times Cartoonist's Sketchbook Portrait of the Eastern Cape Settler Country

Bibliographic Specifications

• Title: Tony Grogan's Settler Country
• Author: Tony Grogan
• Publisher: Don Nelson, Cape Town
• Publication Date: 1980
• ISBN-10: 0909238561
• Edition Details: First Edition.
• Binding: Publisher's tan cloth boards in landscape format, with an illustrated dust jacket.
• Physical Format: Landscape-format hardcover, roughly 280 x 220 mm, 114 pages. Illustrated throughout with pencil, line and watercolour sketches.
• Language: English

Official Condition Report

• The Book: Very Good (VG)
• Exterior / Boards: The plain tan cloth boards are clean, with slight bumping or rubbing at the head of the spine. The boards are protected beneath the illustrated dust jacket.
• Interior: The pages are clean and bright, with pencil and wash sketches printed throughout alongside short passages of descriptive text. The endpapers are orange and the binding appears tight. No maps or plates are present.
• Provenance: Loosely inserted printed compliments slip reading: 'With compliments from: The Mayor of Grahamstown'. The book carries the printed dedication: 'To my children, Kerryn, Tamsin and Ryan'.
• The Dust Jacket: Present, in a durable archival-type plastic cover. The jacket is illustrated with a watercolour town scene and the front flap carries the author biography. Wear includes crumpling and creasing at the top of the spine, a small red mark on the spine near the apostrophe, light rubbing to the edges and a little foxing or spotting at the fore-edge.

Synopsis & Historical Value

Published in Cape Town by Don Nelson in 1980, Tony Grogan's Settler Country is a visual journey through the Eastern Cape, told chiefly through the author's own drawings. Its pencil and watercolour sketches record the towns and buildings of the region, each accompanied by brief descriptive text.

The subject is the area settled by German and British families in the nineteenth century. Grogan draws the settler homesteads along with the forts and military buildings of the old frontier, giving a affectionate picture of the architectural heritage left behind.

Grogan was a Cape Times cartoonist who had already produced books on the heritage of Cape Town, and his travel and sketch books are regarded by some dealers as valued items of Africana. This first edition, with its illustrated jacket, will appeal to collectors of Eastern Cape history and South African architectural art.

Author Profile: Tony Grogan

Tony Grogan was born in Port Elizabeth in 1940 and became a cartoonist, illustrator and artist based in Cape Town. He joined the Cape Times in 1974 and went on to become the longest-serving cartoonist in the newspaper's history, also contributing to the Sunday Times and the Sunday Independent.

His books of drawings include Vanishing Cape Town (1976), Tony Grogan's South African Sketchbook (1984), Between Cape and Cairo: Drawings of Malawi (1995), Tony Grogan's Cape Town Sketchbook (2002) and Tony Grogan's Eastern Cape Sketchbook (2005), as well as Grogan's 100 Best Cartoons (2003).