Did you know?

* Herman Charles Bosman’s collection of short stories, Mafeking Road, has never been out of print since it was first published in 1947.

*He sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Herman Malan, which was his mother’s maiden name.

*He wrote a number of Afrikaans short stories and poems that were published in numerous Afrikaans magazines. In 2001 a collection of his Afrikaans short stories with the title Verborge skatte was published.

*He is especially renowned for his “Oom Schalk Lourens” and “Voorkamer” stories. The actor Patrick Mynhardt won acclaim for his interpretation of Oom Schalk Lourens. He died in 2007 and was buried next to Herman Charles Bosman in the Westpark cemetary in Johannesburg.

Did you know...

The oldest book in the world was written in the lost Etruscan language and was found 60 years ago in a tomb uncovered by excavators in south-western Bulgaria. The book is comprised of six 24-carat solid gold pages and is believed to be around 2,500 years old.

The Etruscans are believed to have migrated from modern western Turkey, settling in northern and central Italy nearly 3,000 years ago and were wiped out by conquering Romans around 400 BC, leaving few written records.

The book can be seen at Bulgaria’s National Museum of History in Sofia.

Featured author - did you know?

Tahir Shah's book Trail of Feathers (2001) investigated the notion that men may have been able to fly. Having read an ancient Spanish manuscript that stated "the Incas flew over the jungle like birds", Shah set off on a journey to the Peruvian Amazon. After research that included a stay with the Shuar tribe, Shah concluded that the Incas partook of a powerful hallucinogen called Ayahuasca which made them believe they were actually flying.

Featured author - did you know?

Here are some random and totally useless facts about this week’s featured author, Isaac Asimov:

- Asimov died on the 6th April 1992 of heart and kidney failure. When his biography was published ten years later, it was revealed that Asimov had been living with HIV contracted from a blood transfusion performed during his December 1983 triple-bypass surgery.

- The famous and celebrated writer, whose science-fiction novels often described space travel, himself had an irrational fear of flying, which severely limited his ability to travel throughout most of his life.

- Asimov was a teetotaler in his later years.

- He was completely inept at any activity that required motor skills – he never learned to swim or ride a bicycle.

- When he was in the army as a young man he achieved the highest score in his company’s intelligence test, although he got the lowest score in the physical-conditioning test.