Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/43

3 1 THE BIRTH OF PRINTING IN SOUTH AFRICA. N the year 1784, probably towards the latter end of it, there arrived in Cape Town the man who was to introduce the art of printing into South Africa. Born at Hof, in the marquisate of Beyreuth, Johan Christian Ritter came of a family whose members were all employed in some branch of the bookselling or bookbinding trade ; two brothers were in the bookselling business at Hof, and two of his three sisters were married into the same trade. Ritter himself retained an interest in a firm engaged in the book-trade in his native land until the day of his death in 1810. Coming to an appointment as bookbinder in the service of the Dutch East India Company, Ritter either brought with him, or received shortly after his arrival, a small printing press, on which, as he states in a memorial addressed to Sir George Yonge some sixteen years later, ' he practised printing such trifles as his small apparatus would allow.' These c trifles ' were probably handbills and advertisements ; but a more ambitious under- taking was the issue ' during three years ' of ' Small Almanacs calculated after the Meridian of this