The dearth of native literature in Buenos Ayres is not surprising, for nature has done little to stimulate it, and in its fertility much to create the commercialism that reigns supreme. The country is in large part rolling prairie-land, and although there is an attraction about it in its wild state, which has called forth a gaucho literature that chiefly takes form in long and crude ballads, the magic of the prairie-land is soon destroyed by houses, factories, dump-heaps, and tin cans. At first sight it would appear hopeless ground for a bibliophile, but with time and patience we found a fair number of old bookstores; and there rarely passes a week without a book auction, or at any rate an auction where some books are put up.
Among the pleasantest memories of our life in Buenos Ayres are those of motoring in to a sale from our house in Belgrano, along the famous Avenida Alvear, on starlit nights, with the Southern Cross high and brilliant. Occasionally when the books we were interested in were far between, we would slip out of the smoke-laden room for a cup of unrivalled coffee at the Café Paulista, or to watch Charlie Chaplin as “Carlitos” amuse the Argentine public.
The great percentage of the books one sees at auctions or in bookstores are strictly utilitarian; generally either on law or medicine. In the old bookstores there are, as in Boston, rows of religious books, on which the dust lies undisturbed. In Argentine literature there are two or three famous novels; most famous of these is probably Marmol’s Amalia, a bloodthirsty and badly written story of the reign of Rosas—the gaucho Nero. Bunge’s Novela de la Sangre is an excellently given but equally lurid account of the same period. La Gloria de Don Ramiro, by Rodriguez Larreta, is a well-written tale of the days of Philip the Second. The author, the present Argentine minister in Paris, spent some two years in Spain studying the local setting of his romance. Most Argentines, if they have not read these novels, at least know the general plots and the more important characters. The literature of the mother country is little read and as a rule looked down upon by the Argentines, who are more apt to read French or even English. La Nacion, which is one of the two great morning papers, and owned by a son of Bartholomé Mitre, publishes a cheap uniform edition, which is formed of some Argentine reprints and originals, but chiefly of French and English translations. The latest publication is advertised on the front page of the newspaper, and one often runs across “old friends” whose “new faces” cause a momentary check to the memory; such as La Feria de Vanidades, the identity of which is clear when one reads that the author is Thackeray. This “Biblioteca de la Nacion” is poorly got up and printed on wretched paper, but seems fairly widely read, and will doubtless stimulate the scarcely existent literary side of the Argentine, and in due time bear fruit. Translations of Nick Carter and the “penny dreadfuls” are rife, but a native writer, Gutierrez, who wrote in the seventies and eighties, created a national hero, Juan Moreira, who was a benevolent Billy the Kid. Gutierrez wrote many “dramas policiales,” which are well worth reading for the light they throw in their side touches on “gaucho” life of those days.
Argentines are justifiably proud of Bartholomé Mitre, their historian soldier, who was twice president; and of Sarmiento, essayist and orator, who was also president, and who introduced the educational reforms whose application he had studied in the United States. At an auction in New York we secured a presentation copy of his Vida de Lincoln, written and published in this country in 1866. Mitre first published his history of General Belgrano, of revolutionary fame, in two volumes in 1859. It has run through many editions; the much-enlarged one in four volumes is probably more universally seen in private houses than any other Argentine book. The first edition is now very rare and worth between forty and fifty dollars; but in a cheap Italian stationery-store we found a copy in excellent condition and paid for it only four dollars and fifty cents. The edition of 1887 brings anywhere from twenty to thirty dollars. Many copies were offered at sales, but we delayed in hopes of a better bargain, and one night our patience was rewarded. It was at the fag end of a private auction of endless rooms of cheap and tawdry furniture that the voluble auctioneer at length reached the contents of the solitary bookcase. Our coveted copy was knocked down to us at eight dollars.
In native houses one very rarely finds what we would even dignify by the name of library. Generally a fair-sized bookcase of ill-assorted volumes is regarded as such. There are, however, excellent legal and medical collections to be seen, and Doctor Moreno’s colonial quinta, with its well-filled shelves, chiefly volumes of South American exploration and development from the earliest times, forms a marked exception—an oasis in the desert. We once went to stay in the country with some Argentines, who seeing us arrive with books in our hands, proudly offered the use of their library, to which we had often heard their friends make reference. For some time we were greatly puzzled as to the location of this much-talked-of collection, and were fairly staggered on having a medium-sized bookcase, half of which was taken up by a set of excerpts from the “world’s great thinkers and speakers,” in French, pointed out as “the library.”
As a rule the first thing a family will part with is its books. There are two sorts of auctions—judicial and booksellers’. The latter class are held by dealers who are having bad times and hope to liquidate some of their stock, but there are always cappers in the crowd who keep bidding until a book is as high and often higher than its market price. The majority of the books are generally legal or medical; and there is always a good number of young students who hope to get reference books cheaply. Most of the books are in Spanish, but there is a sprinkling of French, and often a number of English, German, and Portuguese, though these last are no more common in Argentina than are Spanish books in Brazil. At one auction there were a number of Portuguese lots which went for far more than they would have brought in Rio or São Paulo. Translations from the Portuguese are infrequent; the only ones we can recall were of Camões and Eça de Queiroz. In Brazil the only translation from Spanish we met with was of Don Quixote.
English books generally go reasonably at auctions. We got a copy of Page’s Paraguay and the River Plate for twenty-five cents, but on another occasion had some very sharp bidding for Wilcox’s History of Our Colony in the River Plate, London, 1807, written during the brief period when Buenos Ayres was an English possession. It was finally knocked down to us at twelve dollars; and after the auction our opponent offered us twice what he had let us have it for; we don’t yet know what it is worth. The question of values is a difficult one, for there is little or no data to go upon; in consequence, the element of chance is very considerable. From several sources in the book world, we heard a wild and most improbable tale of how Quaritch and several other London houses had many years ago sent a consignment of books to be auctioned in the Argentine; and that the night of the auction was so cold and disagreeable that the exceedingly problematical buyers were still further reduced. The auction was held in spite of conditions, and rare incunabula are reported to have gone at a dollar apiece.
There was one judicial auction that lasted for the best part of a week—the entire stock of a large bookstore that had failed. They were mostly new books, and such old ones as were of any interest were interspersed in lots of ten or more of no value. The attendance was large and bidding was high. To get the few books we wanted we had also to buy a lot of waste material; but when we took this to a small and heretofore barren bookstore to exchange, we found a first edition of the three first volumes of Kosmos, for which, with a number of Portuguese and Spanish books thrown in, we made the exchange. We searched long and without success for the fourth volume, but as the volumes were published at long intervals, it is probable that the former owner had only possessed the three.
Our best finds were made not at auctions but in bookstores—often in little combination book, cigar, and stationery shops. We happened upon one of these latter one Saturday noon on our way to lunch at a little Italian restaurant, where you watched your chicken being most deliciously roasted on a spit before you. Chickens were forgotten, and during two hours’ breathless hunting we found many good things, among them a battered old copy of Byron’s poems, which had long since lost its binding. Pasted in it was the following original letter of Byron’s, which as far as we know has never before been published:[3]