This catalogue is of the private collection of Ryno Johannes van der Riet and was produced when his collection came up for public sale upon his death in 1828. R.J. van der Riet (1758-1828) was the son of Johannes van der Reit, a member of the Dutch East India Company who settled at the Cape in 1750. R.J. van der Reit was magistrate of Stellenbosch between 1795 and 1812 and became a member of the Cape Colony Council of Justice from 1787.
The 235 titles in van der Reit’s library are organised by size and listed by author and title, with the price and date of publication listed where possible. The works present reflects his position as a lawyer and as a second-generation Dutch-African. The books are almost exclusively in Dutch and include volumes on Roman-Dutch jurisprudence, two bibles and a number of biblical commentaries and exegeses and histories of the Netherlands. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the period in which he lived, van der Riet’s collection also includes a number of books about Napoleon and military strategy during the Napoleonic wars. Late-eighteenth century and early-nineteenth century ‘voyages and travels’ are also well represented in the collection, including a number of popular late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century works about the Cape including Dutch translations of Christian Latrobe’s Diary of a journey to South Africa, Anders Sparrman’s A voyage to the Cape of Good Hope and Francois Le Vaillant’s Voyages to the interior of Africa.
Very few imaginative works are listed, but those present include four titles jointly authored by the eighteenth-century Dutch epistolary novelists Elizabeth Wolff (1738-1804) and Agatha Deken (1741-1804), a translation of the sentimental novel Raymond by Cape-Dutch writer, translator and journalist Joseph Suasso de Lima (1791-1858) and Dutch dramatist and novelist Rhijnvis Feith’s Julia and Lady Jane Grey. The English-language works listed are Hugh Blair’s Lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, Copies of the original letters from [Napoleon] Bonaparte, John Hamilton Moore’s The practical navigator, American loyalist Robert Semple’s Walks and sketches of the Cape of Good Hope and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.
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