Scrawled on the balcony wall of Ike’s Books and Collectables on Florida Road in Durban is a love-letter from the author of Mating Birds: “Lewis Nkosi Shebeen” it reads.
“Whenever he returns to Durban he visits and sits on the balcony with a drink and a book. He is the only one who has written a message outside,” Ike’s co-owner, Joanne Rushby, says of the KwaZulu-Natal-born writer, now living in Switzerland.
On the walls inside there are other felt-tipped notes of appreciation from people, such as 1997 Booker Prize-winner Arundhati Roy, the Treatment Action Campaign’s Zackie Achmat, activist-priest Cosmos Desmond and journalist John Pilger.
Yet wandering around this airy, almost 20-year-old bookshop on the first floor of a building harking back to the turn of last century, the impression is that the notes that have been left behind are less than what any visitor has taken away with them, be it books or memories.
You glean this from the whispering of old pages, the posters advertising Eighties agit-prop theatre pieces and the yellowing maps on the walls, in the passbooks and other apartheid-era paraphernalia on display, in the beaded craft and handmade art.
Ike’s is old school in personality and it is old school in person.
It is a veritable cornucopia of Africana, Marxist literature, radical trade-union pamphlets, modern first editions, cricket books, fiction, travel books, art and photography, an Islamic Shi’ite Encyclopedia, a late 18th-century Bible, a 1981 speech by Fidel Castro on the 28th anniversary of the famous storming of the Moncada garrison.
Co-owner and academic Vishnu Padayachee says the shop’s stock profile has changed in its 20 years of existence: “When Ike’s started it was 75% Africana, in the narrow sense of South African books, especially Natal and Zululand. Now we probably have about 35% Africana, but with a more continental feel. What we have seen a resurgence of — which never used to sell during the Nineties — is Marxist, Leninist and radical literature. Being bought especially by young people.
“We’ve actually been getting more of the radical leftist books coming in in recent years because a lot of lefties have been leaving the country,” he says.
The original Ike’s was founded in 1988 in Chapel Street in the “Indian suburb” of Overport by the late Joseph Daniel “Ike” Mayet, one of those people who still exists vividly in Durban’s folklore.
With the opening of the shop, Mayet became, arguably, the country’s first black antiquarian and Africana bookdealer.
Fair-skinned, straight-haired and from stock including Irish and Scottish blood from maternal grandparents and an Indian-German-Dutch mix in his paternal family tree, Mayet could have been classified white when racial identity was being concretised after the National Party came to power in 1948.
While some of his family applied successfully to be classified white, Mayet chose to remain black/Indian instead, remaining with the Durban casbah community, he grew up among political activists, the gangsters, Indian shopkeepers and the workers.
One of Mayet’s greatest friends was political activist AK Docrat, a man who suffered house arrest and bannings for most of his adult life and, at the time, a renowned collector and peddler of banned literature deemed subversive by the apartheid regime: “Old Man Docrat and the ballie [father] were always together, talking politics or sport or whatever,” says Mayet’s son, Rafs, a noted photographer.
“I think he got a lot of banned books from AK. We used to find them in the posie [home], but they moved on quickly to another house once read,” says Rafs.
He remembers especially a copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies hidden between the covers of a manual for a Morris Minor ora Beetle.
“Him and old man Docrat specialised in banned books and in selling them to gullible people,” says Rafs with a laugh.
A boilermaker by trade Ike was, by all accounts, a raconteur with an intimate knowledge of Durban and whose love of books was apparently kindled when he was diagnosed with osteomyelitis as a 13-year-old.
Mayet spent three years in St Aidan’s Hospital reading.
An oft-repeated story is that when, in 1941, Indian president Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter, Indira, stopped in Durban en route to England, she was taken to the hospital by members of the Natal Indian Congress.
There, she was surprised to find 16-year-old Mayet on a hospital bed deeply engrossed in Homer.
“He’d go out on a Saturday to the different fleamarkets and return with packets of books, jump into bed and then spend the entire weekend reading,” reminisces Mayet’s wife Gadija, who met her husband at the Roslyn’s Tennis Club in Mayville.
“We always got books as presents for birthdays and while I got introduced to the classics very early on, we were allowed only one comic a week,” says Rafs.
Gadija says her husband’s faltering health and when his employers moved their business to Pietermaritzburg in 1981 combined to encourage Mayet to pursue his passion for books: “He started to dabble with bookbinding at the Adams bookshop in town. If you saw the first book he restored you’ll laugh. I laughed, we all laughed,” she says.
Padayachee says Mayet honed his craft of book restoration when he worked on the Gandhi Library collection at 140 Queen Street from the mid-Eighties onwards.
“Vishnu and Enver [Motala] begged him to start this shop. He was getting on in years and we needed the money. So he decided to do the bookshop [which opened on August 8 1988],” says Gadija.
“The challenge then, as it is now with any independent bookshop, was to sell collectables and out-of-print books. It succeeded then because of Ike, and now, because of Jo. Bookshops are about people,” says Padayachee, who co-owns Ike’s with Rushby and academic Julian May.
“People used to come into the shop just to listen to Ike because he was such an interesting storyteller. And then pick up a few books,” says Padayachee, who remembers former Cosatu general secretary Jay Naidoo and Minister of Trade and Industry, Alec Erwin, who both lived nearby, being regular visitors.
Rafs remembers people like artist Dumile Feni popping in whenever he was in the country and photographer Omar Badsha being another regular.
Badsha, as with many others, continues to visit.
“I suppose it’s the personal touch. If someone is looking for a particular book, we will go out of our way to find it. I think that keeps people coming back. Our content also has appeal to trade unionists, students, collectors, so we have a wide variety of people coming in here,” says Rushby, who mans the shop full-time.
While Ike’s retains its old-school humanity, Rushby concedes that being an independent bookshop in South Africa is “a hard slog”.
Interestingly, new technology is helping this old charmer: “We sell about 20% to 30% of our books over the internet and we also have monthly auctions,” says Rushby.
Having moved from Chapel Street to the Overport shopping centre to another old building on Florida Road, Ike’s Books and Collectables can now be found at 48a Florida Road, where it was reopened by JM Coetzee in 2001. Ike Mayet died a year later.
Contact Ike’s Books and Collectibles at 031 303 9214 or click here for Ike’s online inventory.
The heart of restoration
Hearing Joanne Rushby from Ike’s Books and Collectibles describe it, book restoration sounds a lot like open-heart surgery.
There is a need for delicate sensitivity and a preciseness of the fingers in restoring a tattered tome to its former glory.
“Every book is unique and the most important thing is to be patient and to pay a lot of attention to detail. There is a measure of common sense involved too,” she says.
When restoring leather books, for example, staying true to the original colour and material used is a good place to begin. Pages can be washed or bleached to remove stains and as much of the original material which can be used, should.
Rushby, who has masters’ in development planning, studied a three-month course in book restoration in York, England, in 2006 and has since restored more than 30 books.
In some way, she has picked up the knives, scalpels, book presses and whalebone holders of Ike Mayet, the founder of Ike’s.
One of her first jobs was a “tattered and sello taped” collection of certificates of indenture handed out to Indian sugar-cane plantation workers after their period of slavery had ended.
Technically, it was not an actual book restoration, but a good place to start: “It is time consuming, but you have to keep practising to perfect book restoration,” says Rushby.
“The best way to look after your books though is to take them off the shelves, open them and read them. If you let them fester on the shelves they will get ruined,” says Rushby.