Collector's Treasury

A few days ago, I turned 32. When it comes to birthdays, I don’t care about cake, I hate parties, and I react to the pileup of social media well wishes with stress rather than satisfaction. For one day a year, I’m tough to please.

But my husband managed to turn my birthday permafrown upside down when he surprised me with a trip to Collector’s Treasury, an eight-floor antique market in Johannesburg’s Central Business District that includes the largest bookstore in the southern hemisphere.

This place is wild, with nearly two million books stretching over two stories. Books are stacked floor to ceiling. Books are perched perilously. Books spill onto floors. Books tumble and puff up plumes of dust. Books form maze-like passages that are sometimes nearly impossible to navigate. This is not a place for claustrophobics or allergy sufferers.

At first glance, Collector’s Treasury looks like Hoarders-level chaos. There are rooms full of boxed books presumably awaiting processing (I can now picture, with disturbing clarity, what will become of all my beloved novels when I’m dead and gone someday). At a certain point, it seems like the owners – two brothers named Jonathan and Geoffrey Klaas – could no longer keep up with the influx of books and simply started shoving stuff in every available nook and cranny. This results in some hilarious combinations, like a stack on a chair that included a book about shipwrecks, another about Liberace’s love of gold, and a dog-eared Donald Trump hardcover.

On the other hand, there’s an insane depth and breadth to this place’s stock – whole rooms of first editions, a massive cache of reference books, and more leather-bound Victorian literature than a person could possibly read in a lifetime. And Collector’s Treasury is interesting because it’s impossible to imagine it in any place but Johannesburg. This place could never exist anywhere litigious (America’s out), anywhere with high property values (there goes Europe), or anywhere with a wet climate (no Asia or much of South America). It’s both peculiar and particular to this city.

After spending about 30 minutes trying (and failing) to find the African literature section, I got lucky and spied a copy of Heidi Holland’s From Joburg to Jozi atop a stack deep in the basement. I walked out happy – book in hand, about a hundred photos on my camera, and one year older.