Note by Matthew Blackman
03rd February 2021
2020 proved a disappointing year for our publication of South African classics. We attempted to get the copyright for Peter Abrahams’s Path of Thunder, a book on interracial love just before the beginning of apartheid proper. Sadly we were not able to acquire it but are delighted to hear that Faber and Faber will be republishing Abrahams’s novels.
18th August 2020
In 1976, someone threw a petrol bomb into an office at Lovedale. Terrified that irreplaceable historical artefacts might be destroyed, the publishing house transferred its records to Rhodes University. In the course of the move the original typescript of Mhudi surfaced…
Note by Chad Rossouw
I needed a typeface that could hold up on relatively cheap paper and that was legible and compact. To offset this, the typeface needed to have a little elegance. Finally, the aim of the series is to reintroduce African fiction from the 20th Century, so I needed something bookish, but definitely not nostalgic…
Starting a literary publishing project in South Africa is a silly idea – but Matthew writes about the good reasons to do it anyway…
