Collation: Three folio signatures: 1, title page; 2&3, blank; 4 dedication and colophon; 5, preface, signed "Herman J. Hahndick"; 6, blank; 7, introduction signed with the initials "W.B."; 8, photograph of Walter Battiss signed "Hahndick"; 9, printed drawing; 10, blank; 11, an autobiography to 1951; 12 back page with flap and "Printed at the Craft Press, Pretoria, for the Red Fawn Press, Pretoria, 1951".

25 folded folio sheets, 24 with image showing through cut-out cover and one without cut-out. All images are titled by Battiss in pencil on the front page. The whole laid within a paper-wrapped card cover. This copy has been protectively stitched with linen along the spine, probably due to damage.

See list of prints above in Reference Notes.

This preface appears in Battiss' reproduced manuscript:

Since everything, however insignificant, exists for ever in various guises, I was merely re-born below the grey-red Boschberg mountains on the sixth of January, 1906.

instead of doing my Latin homework I squandered my youth in extreme happiness swimming in the Riet River. After leaving school with a fetish certificate I was subjected to the study of hateful law below the round Magaliesberg mountains. Here in the heat I started to paint in real earnest.

After seven years of inner disturbance I went suddenly to the Witwatersrand where I continued my art & worked for my degree. There in the gold dust I was a very poor white and taught for under £20 a month. I was desperately unhappy. After a year's further misery I came to the hill above the Aapies River to teach art & to marry Grace Anderson & later to share Giles.

In 1937 I started looking at ancient paintings in re-discovered caves & rock-shelders. In 1938 I visited foreign habitations on the Thames, the Veine, the Dordogne, the Arno and the Adriatic Sea. In 1948 I was isolated in the Namib Desert & hunted with Onkoemeb the Bushman. In 1949 it was the crowded Alpine Po, the Tiber, and the beloved Seine once more.

1950 - Four of my paintings were shown on the XXV Biennale. 1951 - I sojourned on the Limpopo River & among white rocks, red rocks & black rocks.

A partially complete list of books by Walter Battiss appears on page 220 of Battiss edited by Karin Skawran & Michael Macnamara, Ad Donker, 1985.

Stephan Welz & Co catalogue 24/4/2012, Lot 463. R10,000-R12,000.

Artwork in frames donated to WAM. Portfolio cover and preface housed in JGCBA with Working copy W. Battiss inscribed to Little Mama, Nov 1952 and subsequently To Giles with love. Dad.