Excerpt of a letter from J. Wyley Sessions (president of the South African Mission) to Franklin S. Harris (president of Brigham Young University), dated 6 October 1922:

I am not sure that I told you of my interesting experience recently at Bloemfontein, Orange Free State. I was in a bookstore and while talking with the manager, I told him what my work was and the usual answer came from him. He said he understood that the Government had excluded us from the Country. “I do not believe in letting such things get started in Africa. I do not want to have anything to do with the Mormons.” I talked to him a moment and changed the subject to agriculture, and I asked him to look at some books he had in the most conspicuous rack in the store. He recommended the books very highly and said they were the best on the subjects treated. I fully agreed with him and then took from the rack two books written by Dr. Widtsoe, two of your books, and Dr. [George] Thomas’ [president of the University of Utah] book on irrigation law. You can guess how he felt when I told him that you were all Mormons and that you are at the head of our Church School System.

Those books on display were likely to have been these (but of course I could be in error in one or two cases, since at least two of the men published several books on irrigation and closely related subjects). John A. Widtsoe at least was always running into his books in his travels in Europe and the Middle East.

John A. Widtsoe. The principles of irrigation practice (Macmillan, 1914)
John A. Widtsoe. Dry-Farming: A system of agriculture for countries under a low rainfall (Macmillan, 1920)
Franklin S. Harris. The principles of agronomy: A text-book of crop production (Macmillan, 1915)
Franklin S. Harris. Effects of variations of moisture content on certain properties of soil and on the growth of wheat (Cornell, 1914)
George Thomas. The development of institutions under irrigation (Macmillan, 1920)