BORGES, Jorge Luis. Evaristo Carriego. Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, 1930. Octavo, 118pp. First edition. In brown grained cloth, decorations blocked in blind, title in gold. Issued in pink wrappers (with some copies in grey-green wrappers) this binding is a pleasant enigma. Distinctly suggestive of a publisher's binding, the end papers repeat the name of a Buenos Aires book store. It is possible-indeed it seems probable-that this was a binding specially commissioned by Borges for the purpose of presentation. [Though this is the only such copy we have seen, Loewenstein reports that one of the three copies at Virginia is in a "special binding," though we have not been able to compare the volumes.] Becco 57. Inscribed on the half-title, "A Macedonio Fernández, con reconocida admiración y profundo afecto. Jorge Luis Borges, 1930." Though his legend lives on in Argentina, Macedonio Fernández is all but unknown to the world beyond. It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of his influence on Borges, a close friend for three decades. Beguiling, odd, strikingly modern and original, this elusive figure became Borges's mentor. A short, if somewhat misleading biographical sketch of Fernández (or Macedonio, as apparently everyone called him) occupies nearly four pages of the "Autobiographical Essay" which Borges wrote with the assistance of Norman Thomas di Giovanni, and published in the New Yorker in 1970. In a conversation with Rita Guibert in 1968 Borges said: "Of all the people I've known, the one who impressed me most as a person was Macedonio Fernández, an Argentine writer whose conversation was far above anything he wrote." This is a trifle misleading, as Macedonio's conversation appears to have been enigmatically austere and Socratic rather than sumptuously Johnsonian. The disciples, of whom Borges is the most significant, did most of the talking. Moreover, though he published very little, he wrote prodigiously, in an eddying baroque style that writers less austere in their tastes than Borges (Cortázar, for example), greatly admired.

• Category: Extraordinary Books, Manuscripts & Art
• Keywords: SIGNED
• Language: Deutsch
• Inventory number: 8830LB

Our Price: USD 35,000.00