August Aimé (Guus) Balkema (6 October 1906, in Avereest – 4 September 1996, in Rotterdam), or A. A. Balkema, was a Dutch book trader and publisher active in Amsterdam and South Africa. He played a prominent role in the South African publishing world and was included in They shaped our century (1999), a list of the 100 most influential people in South Africa in the 20th century. Life and career Early years Balkema was born in Avereest in Overijssel, the son of Sijbrand Harkes Balkema and Antje Tjitske Gelderman. On 18 January 1936 in Zandvoort, he wed Anna Stehouwer. Amsterdam After studying French literature, in 1936 he opened a bookstore in the ('House on Three Canals') in Amsterdam. During the Second World War, the bookstore was used to clandestinely print and publish works of poetry and other literature. In the series , which Balkema started in 1942, fifty works were published during the war, including works by Dutch poets like A. Roland Holst and Martinus Nijhoff as well as books in English and French, languages banned by the German occupiers. The prominent typographer Jan van Krimpen handled many of these publications. In 1945 Balkema published a catalogue of the series under the name ('Catalogue of fifty books published without permission in the years 1942−1945'). In 1943 Balkema, along with Adriaan Morriën en Fred Batten, started the series . After the war, this series was taken over by the publishing house . During renovations of the in 2005, a hidden compartment was uncovered containing an archive of wartime documents, including manuscripts and correspondence. The compartment may also have served as a hiding place for (Jewish) (people hiding from the Germans). The archive was donated in 2006 to the library of the ('Royal Association of the Book Trade'), which is housed in the library of the University of Amsterdam. South Africa In 1946, after the end of the war, Balkema sold his bookstore in Amsterdam and left for South Africa to pursue a career as a publisher there. That same year, he published his first book in South Africa, by the South African poet C. Louis Leipoldt. Balkema quickly established his name by publishing specialist books which had often been refused by the more established publishing houses. These included such works as the Hertzog Prize-winning by Elise Muller (1957). Before long, many South African writers began to approach Balkema of their own