A BOOK TO GET LOST IN
Walking down Cape Town’s famous Long Street recently was a huge disappointment for me. Many years ago, it used to be a mecca for second-hand book collectors. This is where I found Joel Barber’s Wild Fowl Decoys and William Veasey’s Blue Ribbon Decoy Pattern book. Both for a song, and I can’t even sing, so it was really very cheap.
Tommy’s Book Exchange has been a stalwart in Long Street since 1969. It sort of started your journey off at the bottom, on the corner of Long and Wale Street, but alas, it is no more. Today Long Street is draped in African Shweshwe, and curio shops cram every nook and cranny – to the delight of tourists. Crappy woodcarvings and colonial butler statuettes as genuine South African as Chinese fireworks at Guy Fawkes. Hurrah, they are in Africa! Fireworks, by the way, are now completely prohibited in Cape Town. Make no mistake, Cape Town has always been a cauldron of cultures, right from oom Jan van Riebeeck’s time. Go read Lawrence Green’s , and , you’ll get the idea right away. In all he wrote four books on Cape Town’s cosmopolitan culture.
