As Ian Colvin observed in his classic Introduction to Sidney Mendelssohn's South African Bibliography, the first recorded voyage round the Cape (by Bartholomew Diaz in 1487) took place at about the time that printing was being ‘invented’ (that is, re-discovered and developed) in Europe. Yet it was not until 1910, more than four centuries later, that the, first comprehensive bibliographical record relating to Southern Africa appeared in print. The almost ‘onlie begetter’ of this seminal work was the elder son of a comparatively impecunious liberal Jewish Rabbi, a mid-19th century immigrant to Britain from Germany, albeit a collateral descendant of the distinguished philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Sidney, brought up in the West country, followed his father to Kimberley soon after the latter had taken up his appointment as Minister to the Jewish Congregation of the small diamond-field town in 1878.