I saw a movie called Value Added Cinema about product placement. Thanks to Rob Courtney for pointing out that it would be playing. There is something eerie about the thought that the brands you see in a major motion picture were all put there on purpose.
The most wonderful surprise of everything I saw at the 37th California International Antiquarian Book Fair (not to be confused with the San Francisco fair I attended last week -- I made a separate overnight trip to Los Angeles, my second time there this week, to attend this other fair) was something I never thought I would see in my lifetime: the only known manuscript of "La Biblioteca de Babel", "The Library of Babel", by Jorge Luis Borges. It was written in Borges's own hand, with the letter "t" crossed at the top, and it started with the English epigraph "By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters" and proceeded (in Spanish)
The universe (which others call the library) ...
The dealer who was exhibiting it followed up on my shock by showing me the manuscript of "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" ("The Garden of Forking Paths") and then a couple of other Borges manuscripts for slightly less famous stories. I was floored.
The likely once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see even the first manuscript was certainly worth the entire trip, even if I hadn't seen signed original works of Feynman, Crick, and others, to say nothing of the first printed edition of Homer (unfortunately not signed). Dayenu!
The idly curious may wonder what the world's only manuscript of one of the greatest stories of one of the past century's greatest writers of stories costs. I did buy something at the fair, and I almost bought something else. The Borges manuscript costs 20,000 times what I bought and 4,000 times what I almost bought.
What I did buy was a print of Arthur Szyk's depicting Rabbi Hillel and his famous summary of the Law. What I almost bought was a single leaf of a medieval psalter (My father taught me that the people who disbind whole books to sell them leaf by leaf do wrong and should be shunned. The dealer who displayed the medieval leaves for sale, well aware of the prevalence of this teaching, had a prominent sign swearing that he was not responsible for the solitary condition of the leaves he was selling. When I saw this, I imagined a sign on a transplant doctor's wall: All organ donors died of natural causes!)
Contact: Seth David Schoen
