To Hell and Back for a Story: My 30-Year Journey to Preserve Forgotten Tales

My journey with books began at the tender age of fourteen. I can still vividly remember the specific series I borrowed from our school library, devouring them over the weekends. It was there, between those pages, that stories first took hold of me. The pure joy of reading a well-written tale hasn’t left me since. In fact, that joy has only deepened with age. So much so that I eventually began writing stories of my own, savoring every moment of the creative process.

It is actually quite funny how my first ebook came to light. About five years ago, on a quiet Monday evening, I decided to write a short story about a hero in the mighty Sahara Desert, risking everything to save a damsel in distress. I started typing without a plan, letting the ideas flow through me. As I wrote, the story seemed to reveal itself on the screen. Hours later, I had finished my first short story.

The next evening, bubbling with ideas, I decided to write a sequel. I was hooked. Every night that week, I wrote a new chapter, and by midnight on Friday, I had five stories. I was incredibly proud, even though I hadn’t done any research or planning, it was pure imagination. I posted them on Facebook, just for people to enjoy. To my surprise, a professor who writes books sent me an email. He told me that for someone with no formal training, my work was impressive. You can imagine how I floated on air for days! Anything to do with stories, reading, writing or creating, it is my life’s great passion. I later tried my hand at thrillers, horror, and romance, and even gained experience writing a story for the radio, where sound effects are crucial to bring the tale to life.

But to truly understand this journey, we must go back nearly thirty years.

I grew up on a cattle farm outside Vryburg, in the North West province of South Africa. As a sixteen-year-old boy, my six siblings and I lived in a hostel during the school week, only seeing our parents when they fetched us for weekends on the farm. The hostel walls felt suffocating, and we lived for the brief moments we were allowed into town to buy sweets.

On one of these outings, I walked into a café that had everything. Sweets, drinks, and those old Asteroids and other action arcade machines. But my eyes drifted past the games and landed on something else. It was the most beautiful row of book covers I had ever seen. There were hundreds of softcover books, stacked high, spanning five different genres. In that moment, I made a choice. I gave up my spending money for the week. No sweets or cold drinks this week for me. Then I went ahead and bought two books instead.

I couldn’t wait to get back to the hostel. I realized I was holding something precious. The moment I dug into the story, I was swept away by the joy of reading pulp fiction by a world-renowned South African author, though I didn’t know his fame at the time. When I finished, I knew I had to go back for the rest. I had to wait a full, agonizing week, but the obsession had begun.

Every Wednesday, I scoured that café for new releases like romance, action, adventure, drama, suspense and more. My book collection grew rapidly. Back on the farm, I found an old zinc trunk to lock my treasures away so they wouldn’t “grow legs” and disappear. This ritual continued throughout high school. Some series took seven years to complete. The longest, a Western set in the South African Lowveld, spanned 74 books. I collected the final volumes while studying at university to become an Agrometeorologist.

After two years of mandatory military service, I began my career. I was lucky enough to land a job in the Western Cape, taking over for a retiring agrometeorologist. When I moved, I took hundreds of my beloved books with me. The moment I could afford a house, I built a library in my garage with wooden shelves that still display those books today.

But my story was far from over.

Because I had started collecting some series late, I had missed the early editions. I turned to the internet to find them, placing ads to buy or exchange books. That is how I met Anton.

Anton was a man in his late sixties suffering from a rare, cruel disease that prevented his body from absorbing nutrients. He was slowly starving to death, yet his mind remained sharp. He lived in the Highveld, 1,500km away from me, but my company’s head office was in his city. When I traveled for work, I stayed with him and his wife. We became dear friends. He was a chartered accountant, highly intelligent, and taught me so much about life. I still miss him today.

Our friendship began through the mail, swapping books, but nothing prepared me for my first visit to his home. He had three double garages. One of them was packed from floor to ceiling with boxes of Afrikaans storybooks. I guessed there were 30,000 books, maybe more. It was a platinum mine of rare literature with genres and authors I had never seen. For a lover of softcover books, it felt like winning the lottery five times in one day. At that time, Anton was undoubtedly the biggest collector of Afrikaans storybooks in South Africa.

Before meeting Anton, I had already begun a massive project with my own collection of 600 books. I wanted to preserve them for future generations. I taught myself to code and built a website (www.softcoverbooks.co.za) to display the beautiful, colorful covers of authors like F.A. Venter, Gerrie Radlof, Braam le Roux, and many more.

When Anton passed away, his wife gave me a life-changing offer. I could inherit all his books but I had to come quickly and take what I wanted before the family get hold of it.

I rented a trailer immediately and drove through the night. I spent two days and two nights in that garage, sifting through thousands of titles, filtering out the softcovers I needed to save. I was exhausted, body aching, facing a 1,500km drive back to Cape Town with a double trailer heavy with books. With many prayers, and perhaps some luck, I made it home safely.

My garage library was ready. I unloaded about 1,500 books onto the wooden racks and what a feeling that was! The thousands of books left behind, I gave to another collector who sold books for a living. My goal was different than his. I didn’t want to sell; I wanted to preserve.

Then began the hardest work of my life.

I decided to scan my library, nearly 2,000 books. It was an immense undertaking. My scanner took 45 seconds per page. A 90-page book took forever. Every weeknight, I worked from 7:00 PM to midnight, pressing down pages until my shoulders screamed in pain. It was grueling work I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I battled on like this for ten years. I once calculated that I spent 15,000 hours just scanning. It certainly kept me out of trouble!

Eventually, I began selling these scans as PDFs to cover costs, using free social media to advertise. It bought the bread, but not much else. My full-time job kept me busy, but technology was about to change everything.

Fast forward to the era of Artificial Intelligence.

Before AI, converting my scanned PDFs into editable text for Amazon was a nightmare. The old software left thousands of errors and fixing a single book took days. I had hundreds of books sitting on my hard drive, waiting for a cleanup that would have taken me another 15 years or more to finish.

Then came AI. Suddenly, I could clean up 99% of the errors in a fraction of the time. I could translate these Afrikaans gems into English, opening them up to a global audience. I was careful, though as I insisted on “direct translations” to preserve the original author’s voice, rather than letting the AI rewrite the soul of the story. I even used AI to remaster the covers.

In just the last three years, I have published more than 200 additional ebooks on Amazon. A feat that previously took me two decades to reach 100. My total is now closing in on 350 titles.

I can look back at the past thirty years and truly say I went to hell and back to reach this stage. It was a journey of physical pain, frustration, and immense sacrifice. But it was also a journey of great joy. I want the whole world to experience the incredible stories I read as a young boy, sitting under a tree on the farm, lost in adventure.

My goal is 1,000 ebooks. With this new technology, the path ahead is smoother. And perhaps, now that the preservation work is speeding up, I will finally find the time to return to my first love, and that is writing my own stories again. I have so many left to tell.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my journey as much as I enjoyed living it. It has been a wild, sometimes crazy ride, but it taught me that a good story is a treasure you carry with you for the rest of your life and nobody can take it away from you!

Ebook Collection?
With nearly 350 ebooks on Amazon across multiple genres, I have plenty more for you to read. Browse my full library on my Amazon Author Page HERE.

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