If this is retirement...
- Lucille Davie
Witsie Kathy Munro is a heritage champion with an amazing collection of books
Some people have to exercise every day. For their spiritual sanity. Some people have to cook breathtaking meals every day. For their creative sanity. Kathy Munro has to collect books. For her innate curiosity.
She says she has collected books since she was a teenager. “I started collecting more seriously when I got married.”
She now has a collection that takes up three rooms, plus an ample passageway. In total, her collection consists of 16 300 books - enough to push anyone over the book ecstasy edge. And she continues to look out for books that interest her.
Walking into her house is an adventure: there are surreptitious boxes of books everywhere, waiting to be catalogued. Antique furniture lives happily with lovely ceramic collections and comfortable rugs and well-sat-on chairs and sofas. Books sit contentedly in glass cabinets.
Fortunately she has a spacious three-roomed flat below her house that accommodates her collection, built for her by her husband, Keith, “for his sanity”, she laughs. The walls are lined from floor to ceiling with books. The passageway is lined in the same way. She's brought in stand-alone bookshelves for extra storage space, and laments that she has no more space for books. The only places where there are no bookshelves are the bathroom and kitchen.
400 Johannesburg books
Munro has a collection of over 400 books on Johannesburg alone – probably all the books that have ever been published on the city. She has been collecting Joburg books for more than 40 years - one of the first books on the city she bought was Anna Smith's legendary Johannesburg Street Names. It's rarer than hen's teeth these days.
But her collection covers a broad range of topics: for many years she taught economic history at Wits University, so she has economic histories of Germany, Japan, India, the United States and the United Kingdom. Run your excited finger along the shelves: banking, business, history, economics, architecture, travel, the Anglo-Boer War, biography, Africana, Rhodesiana, military history, large books on cartography...
“I don't go for rare books,” she says, “I go for areas of interest, or a particular author.” But that doesn't mean she hasn't got rare books – she has, probably dozens of them, like The Gold Mines of the Rand, by Hatch and Chalmers, published in 1895. Or, A Guide to Natal, published in 1890. Or, the two 1953 edition volumes of William Burchell's Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (originally published in 1823). Or a signed copy of the two volumes of The autobiography of John Hays-Hammond, the man who managed Cecil John Rhodes’s gold mines, and was believed to have sparked the Jameson Raid.
Books published by Balkema and the Folio Society are precious too, she says.
Born in England
Munro was born in England - her mother was a “war bride” - and she was born at the end of the Second World War. When she was two years old her parents emigrated to South Africa. The Munro family settled in Kew, Johannesburg, and her father worked at the Modderfontein dynamite factory. He worked for the Royal Air Force, ensuring planes were operational for training RAF pilots. Later he trained as a fitter and