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5 BORGES, Jorge Luis – GÜIRALDES, Ricardo. Don Segundo Sombra. Buenos Aires: Editorial Proa, 1926 from the library of Jorge Luis Borges First edition, first printing, a major association copy, being the copy of Jorge Luis Borges, with his ownership signature dated Buenos Aires 1936 on the title page. Güiraldes and Borges each influenced the literary career of the other. They met around 1924–5, and Borges helped Güiraldes launch the magazine Proa . It was Güiraldes who gave Borges his copy of Joyce’s Ulysses , and he would often visit Borges with his guitar. “Later Borges confessed that he could never finish Güiraldes’s novel Don Segundo Sombra ; this gives us an insight into how Borges read, for he rarely finished any novels” (Wilson, p. 72). Nevertheless, Borges contributed an article on it to the magazine Sur in 1952, in which he compared the work to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn . Don Segundo Sombra , the best-known work of Güiraldes, had a significant role in the development of “gauchesque” literature. A heavily romanticised “gaucho” was a recurrent figure in South American literature from the 1870s onwards. Güiraldes redefined the character, no longer so heroic, but still presenting an elegiac view of a way of life that has passed. The novel was published to acclaim, and Güiraldes died a few months later, after a literary career generally marked without popular success. The copy was later passed to his brother-in-law, the Spanish poet and Ultraist Guillermo de Torre (1900–1971), with his illustrated ex-libris stamp to the first blank. This is one of several books with Borges’s ownership signature or annotations that appeared in the Buenos Aires sale of Guillermo de Torre’s library in 1980. Small quarto. Original brown printed wrappers. With glassine jacket. Housed in a black cloth flat-back box by the Chelsea Bindery. Light
chipping at extremities, short split at head of front joint. A very good copy. ¶ Jorge Luis Borges, “Don Segundo Sombra”, Sur , nos. 217–8, 1952; Jason Wilson, Jorge Luis Borges , 2006. £3,500 [130488] 6 BOWEN, Elizabeth. Encounters. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd, 1923 From the library of hugh walpole, her friend, admirer, and fellow novelist First edition, first impression, of the author’s first book, a collection of short stories, signed by the author on the front free endpaper. This is a wonderful association copy, with the Brackenburn bookplate of Hugh Walpole to the front pastedown. Walpole was a great admirer of Bowen’s writing and included three of her stories in his anthology A Century of Creepy Stories (1934), and, writing in his own copy of The Death of the Heart , he declared it “the most beautiful novel of 1938”. It was in 1938 that he developed a stronger friendship with Bowen and, writing to a friend, “thanked God that she and Virginia Woolf no longer frightened the life out of him, as they used to do” (Walshe). Octavo. Original blue cloth, titles and geometric square design to spine and front board in gilt, fore edge untrimmed. Binding square and tight, minor rubbing to spine ends and tips, offsetting to endpapers and a little light foxing to outer leaves, short closed tear to fore edge of pp. 177–8; a near-fine copy. ¶ Luke Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval , 2012; Eibhear Walshe, ed., Elizabeth Bowen: Visions and Revisions, Irish Writers in their Time , 2008. £1,750 [151587] 7 BRETON, André. Manifeste du surréalisme. Poisson Soluble. Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1924
INEXHAUSTIBLE LIFE
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