‖kɑbbo ‘much enjoyed the thought that the Bushman stories would become known by means of books’. That was in Cape Town in the early 1870s, and ‖kɑbbo was speaking to Lucy Lloyd, sister-in-law of the highly esteemed philologist Wilhelm Bleek. ‖kɑbbo was a |xɑm San man who had been brought to Cape Town as a prisoner, having been convicted of stock theft. But he remained in the Bleek family home as a teacher (Bleek and Lloyd's own word), passing on to Bleek and Lloyd the lore and lives of his |xɑm people. In her foreword to the first edition of this book, Janette Deacon outlines the way in which the Bleek family worked and amassed a globally unequalled archive of a vast array of material in a language that is no longer spoken. This book places that work in the hands of a wide readership.

As is now well known, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd's archive of work conducted in the 1870s with |xɑm San teachers is now preserved in the Jagger Library, University of Cape Town. It is of high significance to anthropologists, linguists and historians, not only in southern Africa but worldwide. The phonetic texts in the archive are the next best thing to a nineteenth-century tape recorder, preserving as they do the actual |xɑm words. We can ‘hear’ those |xɑm words that were spoken well over a century ago and speak them for ourselves. This is truly remarkable.

Dorothea Bleek published nine collections of extracts from the archive in the 1930s in the journal Bantu Studies (now African Studies). Each part deals with a separate subject, such as ‘Lions’, ‘Baboons’, ‘Omens, Wind-making, Clouds’, ‘Sorcerers’ and ‘Special Speech of Animals and Moon used by the |xɑm Bushmen’. Jeremy Hollmann edited and published these extracts, together with other material, in 2004. The book became a cornerstone of San studies. Not surprisingly, the first edition has sold out. But the work remains absolutely fundamental to scholars of the Khoekhoe and San and to a great many interested lay people as well.

Now Dr Hollmann has prepared an enlarged second edition that contains much new material. He has gone back to the original manuscripts and checked the published versions against them. He has thus been able to identify and bring to light sentences in the original transcriptions that Dorothea Bleek omitted when she prepared the extracts for publication.