As in Argentina, the best-known Chilian writers are historians or lawyers; and in our book-hunts in Santiago we encountered more or less the same conditions that held in Buenos Ayres—shelf upon shelf of legal or medical reference books and technical treatises. The works of certain well-known historians, such as Vicuña Mackenna and Amonategui, consistently command relatively high prices; but, as a whole, books are far cheaper on the west side of the Andes. One long afternoon in the Calle San Diego stands out. It was a rich find, but we feel that the possibilities of that store are still unexhausted. That afternoon’s trove included the first edition of Mungo Park’s Travels, with the delightful original etchings; a History of Guatemala, written by the Dominican missionaries, published in 1619, an old leather-bound folio, in excellent shape; a first edition of Holmes’s Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and three of the eight volumes of State Papers and Publick Documents of the United States. In these last there was James Monroe’s book-plate, and it was curious to imagine how these volumes from his library had found their way to a country where his “doctrine” has been the subject of such bitter discussion and so much misinterpretation. The value of the original covers was no more understood in Chile than in Argentina, and we got a complete set of Vicuña Mackenna’s Campaña de Tacna in the original pamphlets, as published, for but half what was currently asked for bound and mutilated copies.
Valparaiso proved a barren field, and although one of the chief delights in book-hunting lies in the fact that you can never feel that you have completely exhausted the possibilities of a place, we came nearer to feeling that way about Valparaiso than we ever had about a town before. We found but one store that gave any promise, and from it all we got were the first seven volumes of Dickens’s Household Words in perfect condition, and the Campaign of the Rapidan.
The little coast towns of Chile and Peru are almost as barren as the desert rocks and sand-hills that surround them; but even here we had occasional surprises, as when we picked up for fifty cents, at Antofogasta, a desolate, thriving little mining-port in the north of Chile, Vicuña Mackenna’s Life of O’Higgins, for which the current price is from ten to fifteen dollars. Another time, in Coquimbo, we saw a man passing along the street with a hammered-copper bowl that we coveted, and following, we found him the owner of a junk-shop filled with a heterogeneous collection of old clothes, broken and battered furniture, horse-trappings, and a hundred and one odds and ends, among which were scattered some fifty or sixty books. One of these was a first edition of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales in the familiar old brown boards of Ticknor & Company.
Our South American book-hunting ended in Lima, the entrancing old city of the kings, once the capital of the New World, and not yet robbed by this commercial age of all its glamour and backwardness. We expected much, knowing that when the Chilians occupied the city in 1880 they sacked the national library of fifty thousand volumes that their own liberator, San Martin, had founded in 1822, and although many of the books were carried off to Chile, the greater part was scattered around Lima or sold by weight on the streets. We shall always feel that with more time, much patience, and good luck we could have unearthed many treasures; although at first sight the field is not a promising one, and, as elsewhere, one’s acquaintances assure one that there is nothing to be found. In spite of this, however, we came upon a store that appeared teeming with possibilities. Without the “flaire” or much luck it might be passed by many times without exciting interest. Over the dingy grated window of a dilapidated colonial house is the legend “Encuadernacion y Imprenta” (“Binding and Printing.”) Through the grimy window-panes may be seen a row of dull law-books; but if you open the big gate and cross the patio, with its ancient hand-well in the centre, on the opposite side are four or five rooms with shelves of books along the walls and tottering and fallen piles of books scattered over the floor. Here we picked up among others an amusing little old vellum-covered edition of Horace, printed in England in 1606, which must have early found its way to South America, to judge from the Spanish scrawls on the title-page. We also got many of the works of Ricardo Palma, Peru’s most famous writer, who built up the ruined national library, which now possesses some sixty thousand volumes, of which a twelfth part were donated by our own Smithsonian Institution. One of the volumes we bought had been given by Palma to a friend, and had an autograph dedication which in other countries would have greatly enhanced its value, but which, curiously enough, seems to make no difference in South America. In Buenos Ayres we got a copy of the Letters from Europe of Campos Salles, Brazil’s greatest president, which had been inscribed by him to the Argentine translator. Once in São Paulo we picked up an autographed copy of Gomes de Amorim, and in neither case did the autograph enter into the question of determining the price.
We had heard rumors of possibilities in store for us in Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, but Lima was our “farthest north,” for there our ramblings in South America were reluctantly brought to a close. We feel, however, that such as they were, and in spite of the fact that the names of many of the authors and places will be strange to our brethren who have confined their explorations to the northern hemisphere, these notes may awaken interest in a little-known field, which, if small in comparison with America or the Old World, offers at times unsuspected prizes and rewards.
VI
Seth Bullock—
Sheriff of the Black Hills Country