
Fascinating story today at The Paris Review about a first edition of Jorge Luis Borges’s early poems stolen—and then returned (perhaps?)—to the National Library of Argentina. Forgeries, facsimiles, and book thefts! The following paragraph points out that Borges himself was once director of the library:
The National Library is as old as Argentina: it was created in 1810, together with the first national government, and its first director was Mariano Moreno, one of the greatest national heroes and the founder of the country’s first newspaper. The library was, at one point, something to be proud of, and Borges’s name is inextricably linked to its history; he was its director for eighteen years, between 1955 and 1973. By then, books were already disappearing from its shelves. When asked whether this was true, he replied, in typical fashion, “I can’t tell whether books are being stolen, because I’m blind.”
Very interesting
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Reblogged this on Иди Фри.
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The first comment to the original article is baffling. True unwarranted criticism.
The third-to-last paragraph-sentence, too, doesn’t make sense. There are seemingly 149 other copies of Fervor; it’s reasonable that this facsimile may be of some other dispossessed copy.
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On second thought, I may have a fundamental misunderstanding of things.
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