GOLDMANN, Charles Sydney.

£4,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

South African Mines; their Position, Results, & Developments: First edition of Goldmann's magnum opus, one of the most important and substantial studies of South African gold mines. Sydney Goldmann (1868-1958), an uitlander of German-Jewish descent, made his fortune in gold mining; he later served as a Boer War correspondent for The Standard alongside Winston Churchill, before entering the House of Commons as a Unionist MP from 1910 until 1918. He first published a study of South Africa's gold mines in 1892, his history of the Witwatersrand companies, which met with a favourable reaction from the investing public both in Europe and South Africa. He followed this with the present, vastly expanded work; richly illustrated, it offered investors the most detailed study to date of South African mines, at a time when there was a rush of capital to the region in the hope of rapid wealth, and only a few years before the question of the gold mines would trigger the Boer War.Provenance: founded in May 1773, the Birmingham Assay Office is one of four such offices in the UK responsible for assaying (testing) and hallmarking precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, and palladium). Its establishment was a product of the growth of large scale manufacturing and the use of machines for silver production in Birmingham and Sheffield during the 1770s. The Office's library is particularly rich in works on metallurgy, mining, and design, but also includes books on chemistry, alchemy, numismatics,

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