The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures

Through this innovative methodology, Dick aptly shows how South African readers used reading and books to resist unjust regimes and build community across South Africa's class and racial barriers.

Archie L. Dick is a professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Pretoria.

‘This wide ranging book contains a treasure-trove of stories about print cultures in South Africa between the mid-seventeenth century and mid-1990s… Dick has produced a study that is informative as well as ambitious.’

Isabel Hofmeyr:

‘This is an inventive and engaging book that will do much to advance studies of southern African print culture and reading and their broader significance. Richly researched and lucidly written, the book will lend itself well to classroom use.’

Daniel Magaziner:
‘Trailblazing study.’

Gerald Groenewald:
‘Engaging and path breaking book…Rarely, if ever, is a work on South African history published that covers such a vast stretch of time, and is based on such a truly remarkable range of primary sources.’

Anthony Olden:

‘The scholarship is exemplary, and the book opens up new areas of research.’

Charles van Onselen:
‘Archie Dick’s Hidden History offers us a fine example of a historian working in an imaginative way to show how, at various junctures in the South African past, book and reading cultures have arisen, survived or even thrived despite the ways in which controlling and repressive regimes have sought to destroy or limit the impact of reading and writing for their own purposes.’