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Fontein Books, which for some thirty years published an average of a book a year on such different subjects as travel, biography, ornithology and botany, engineering geology, and architecture and building, recently began to buy small collections of secondhand books. In 2005, after a short period of internet selling, Fontein's founder, Richard Proctor-Sims, who has also been a writer and editor for half a century, relocated from South Africa's largest city to a small town in the Karoo, where he opened his first bookshop. Apart from Southern African history and natural history, biography, political science, sport and fiction in English and Afrikaans, Fontein's shelves include sections on travel and exploration, modern English fiction, English literature, music, and food and wine. Fontein welcomes booklovers to its Southern Free State bookshop close to the Northern Cape border. We also run the Artists' Retreat guesthouse and the Oom Japie se Huis restaurant and bar. In 1822 Philippolis became the first settlement in the Transgariep (1822) and today its known for its mission and Griqua history and for its Karoo and Victorian architecture. |
