Paradise found…

CHRIS BENNETT was recently a guest at the Brenthurst Library, one of this country’s most outstanding collections.

I AM indebted to Mr Leo Preston of Uvongo for kindly sending me a photo copy of a short story by one of my favourite writers, the master of the short story, Somerset Maugham. The story is The Book-Bag, which I shall read on a wet afternoon. I seem to be still in the middle of a beautiful, tranquil sea of books.

Last week I found myself in what is possibly the closest to heaven I may get. I took two friends, both serious book collectors, to the Brenthurst Library, a striking building erected 25 years ago in the grounds of Brenthurst, a 45 hectare private estate in the centre of Parktown in Johannesburg.

The library houses an outstanding collection of books, paintings, drawings and correspondence relevant to the early development of this country, probably the most important such collection in private hands anywhere.

The atmosphere in the library is soft and relaxing, the lighting designed to be not too harsh, for books are sensitive to light, and the object of this immense exercise, begun around 1920 by Sir Ernest Oppenheimer was the preservation for future generations of the life of South Africa.

Often in this column I have said that we have only language, by which I mean that mankind has only his language by which he may communicate with others, especially those close to him.

The astonishing Brenthurst collection includes 28 000 books, which are essentially Africana; the largest collection in the world of the paintings of Thomas Baines; Baines’s notebooks; Livingstone’s complete correspondence and the original of all the publications relating to South African ornithology: that is the tip of the iceberg.

These precious papers are kept in beautifully bound boxes, made for the purpose in the library’s bindery and stored in the document room, which is kept cooler, drier and darker than the rest of the library.

The third in the Brenthurst series of books, the library’s chefs-d’œuvres, in which unpublished material from the library is made available in fine bindings limited to 1000 books, is now on sale. It draws on the remarkable works of the French explorer and ornithologist, Francois le Vaillant (1753-1824), which are housed in the safe keeping of the Brenthurst Library.

One of my friends, a physicist and botanist, was speechless when he was allowed to examine a work by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swedish scientist whose life was devoted to the naming of plants and animals in an ordered fashion, a system which is unlikely ever to change.

The bindery I found especially interesting. The resident binder, Alan Jeffrey, explained the workings of the bindery and the nature of his current undertaking: a box for the storage of rare documents. Not unlike the hundreds and hundreds of similar boxes in the document room, it is, as you may imagine, craftsmanship of the highest order. This particular piece, which cost several thousand rands, was destined for Hong Kong.

The bindery is primarily there to keep all the books and papers safe and sound and to bind new acquisitions. The pictures are tended by specialists in the appropriate field of art.

The morning was spent under the careful guidance of the librarian, Fylyppa Meyer, whose knowledge and charm encapsulate the objectives of the Brenthurst Library.

This enchanting day drew to a close with lunch at Moyo at the Zoo Lake, an unusual restaurant which specialises in food from across the African continent, food most appropriate for this occasion. The wine was Laborie.