WIT, Anne Augusta Henriette de. Facts and Fancies about Java … Second edition, revised and enlarged. The Hague and London , Van Stockum and Luzac & Co., 1900.
8vo. Original green gilt-stamped pictorial cloth; pp. [viii], 266; frontispiece and plates after photographs; upper hinge with one little repair, browning to endpapers, inscription to front fly-leaf; otherwise very good.
A very rare richly-illustrated account of Java by the anglophone Dutch writer Augusta de Wit (1864-1939), who was born in Sumatra, and educated in both Holland and England. The present work is based upon a series of articles which de Wit wrote in English for the Singapore Straits Times, which were collected under the title Facts and Fancies about Java, and published in Singapore by the Straits Times Press in 1898. This revised second edition, published in The Hague and London, appeared in 1900 (interestingly, no copy of the first edition is recorded in UK libraries by COPAC, so presumably the print-run was small), and was followed by two subsequent editions (1905 and 1912, equally rare). As a contemporary reviewer wrote in The Times, 'these sketches of life, manners, and nature in the Eastern colony of Holland are drawn with a vivid and sympathetic pen and are well worth preserving in a less ephemeral form than that in which they originally appeared' (28 April 1898, p. 7).
COPAC does not list a first edition, and only two copies of this, in the Royal Asiatic Society and the British Library.
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