Unto Dust by Herman Charles Bosman

Unto Dust (Fifth Edition in Original Dust Jacket)

Herman Charles Bosman's Oom Schalk Lourens Stories of the Western Transvaal, Edited by Lionel Abrahams

Bibliographic Specifications

• Title: Unto Dust
• Author: Herman Charles Bosman
• Editor: Lionel Abrahams
• Publisher: Human & Rousseau, Cape Town and Pretoria
• Publication Date: 1974
• ISBN-10: 0798104910
• Edition Details: Fifth Edition, 1974. Edited by Lionel Abrahams, with a foreword by William Plomer.
• Binding: Publisher's brown cloth boards with a printed mustard and black dust jacket.
• Physical Format: Standard small octavo (8vo).
• Language: English

Official Condition Report

• The Book: Very Good (VG)
• Exterior / Boards: Brown cloth boards, clean, with slight bumping at the top fore-corner. The spine shows light edge wear and rubbing.
• Interior: The pages are cream and clean, with no markings. The text block is tight. Slight toning or dust along the top edge.
• The Dust Jacket: Present, in a mustard and black design. The spine shows chipping and loss of colour along the edges, with a light patch near the foot and small nicks at the head and tail. A thin diagonal scratch or crease crosses the author's name on the front panel. The edges are rubbed, with white showing on the front and back. The lower fore-edge of the flap is chipped and torn, with a piece missing from the front flap. The jacket carries a quotation from William Plomer praising Bosman's playful, sly Afrikaner irony. It will be supplied in a durable archival-type plastic cover.

Synopsis & Historical Value

Unto Dust gathers twenty-four short stories by Herman Charles Bosman, told in the voice of the storyteller Oom Schalk Lourens and set in the western Transvaal after the Second Anglo-Boer War. Through his narrator's sly, rambling tales, Bosman captures the contradictions of life in rural South Africa.

The collection was edited by Lionel Abrahams, with a foreword by William Plomer, and forms part of the uniform edition of Bosman's works. The first edition appeared in 1963. This is the fifth edition, published in Cape Town in 1974 by Human & Rousseau. Roy Campbell praised the stories as among the best South African short stories ever published.

For collectors of Africana literature and of Bosman, this is a handsome, jacketed copy of one of the key collections of the Groot Marico tales.

Author Profile: Herman Charles Bosman

Herman Charles Bosman (1905-1951) is widely regarded as South Africa's greatest short-story writer. Born at Kuils River near Cape Town to an Afrikaner family, he was raised speaking English as well as Afrikaans. After graduating he taught in the Groot Marico, and his stories of that region remain his best-known work.

In 1926 he shot and killed his stepbrother; his death sentence was commuted to ten years, of which he served about four. He drew on those years for Cold Stone Jug (1949). From 1948 until his death he worked as a proof editor at The Sunday Express. Only three books appeared in his lifetime: Mafeking Road, Jacaranda in the Night and Cold Stone Jug.