The alternate book universe that is South Africa

One of the things I like best about South Africa is how quickly one enters another and very different intellectual world.  Walk into a good used book shop, such as Clarke’s in Cape Town, and you find a slew of quality history books and biographies you otherwise would not have heard of.  Buy them and read them and be transported.  So many of them exist apart from the usual dialogues.  For instance, I recently bought Digging Deep – A History of Mining in South Africa by Jade Davenport.  It looks very good.  Furthermore, you cannot tell how good the books are until you pick them up and read through a bit, as most of the usual cues of cover, author and author’s affiliation, publisher and so on are absent.  Or at least unknown to me.  I had not known by the way that finance economist Emanuel Dirman comes from South Africa and wrote a personal memoir.  So many books here contain surprises once you open them.

Nowhere else is a used book store more interesting, at least from an English-language perspective.