In the Era of iPhones, Is Rare Book Collecting an Increasingly Quixotic Mission?
Books are like people. They have human characteristics. A book has a spine, as we know, and according to antiquarian booksellers, it also has joints (where the covers meet the spine) and a crown (the top of the spine). We are able to grasp a book in more senses than one, to hold it as we might hold another person's hand. The sale of an old, rare book is not simply a matter of exchanging pages for money, trading one set of dry leaves for another. Besides the narrative told in its pages, there is the history of the book's time in the world, the people who have touched it and the lives it has touched.
A case in point is a 400-year-old copy of Don Quixote, considered the first novel in western literature. It's a second edition, from 1605, and is expected to fetch £500,000 when it goes under the hammer in Paris on December 14. Cervantes' romance about a man's adventures in pursuit of noble ends finds an echo in the fortunes of the bundle of wood pulp and calfskin in which it is bound.
Our story begins in the 1930s, with the tinkling of a doorbell at Maggs Bros., a London book dealer. A young gentleman from South America asks if he may purchase a copy of Cervantes' masterpiece. He is indulging a serious book-collecting habit earlier than most, but he certainly has the means for it. He is Jorges Ortiz Limones, en route from Bolivia to become that country's ambassador to Paris, and he is the son-in-law of the so-called King of Tin, the “Rockefeller of the Andes,” Simón I. Patiño, who has vast metal interests in Latin America. The choice of the novel is apt. A cornerstone of Spanish literature—Cervantes is to his homeland what Shakespeare is to Britain and Dante to Italy—it is also full of the New World, and the conquest,
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