The value of literature.

• Author: Perales, Jaime
• Position: MILESTONES AND FIRST EDITIONS - Washington Antiquarian Book Fair

THE ANNUAL Washington Antiquarian Book Fair, held during the first part of the year in the US capital, brings together booksellers and collectors to buy or--in the case of the majority of browsers--just to see or touch a first edition of one of the great works of literature of all time.

A novelty such as a first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, published in Paris in 1922, carried a price tag of US$35,000. For a similar price, one could acquire These Thirteen by William Faulkner, with a dedication by the author to his first literary agent, Bernard Wasson. The rarity of Ernest Hemingway's first work, Three Stories and Ten Poems--only 300 copies were printed in Paris in 1923--boosted its price tag to $65,000.

Although some German and French titles could be found here and there, the vast majority of books were written in English by US authors. One notable exception was the Latin American novel Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), published in Argentina by Editorial Sudamericana in 1967; it sat in a glass case like Snow White sleeping in the forest, waiting to be awakened by a prosperous buyer. The first paperback edition of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel--its pages now a yellowing ivory hue, its cover showing a large white ark with a bushy tree growing out of it, set against a blue background--was priced at $5,500. The same volume could easily have gone for $12,500 if the author had signed it.

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Collecting the complete works of the Colombian author could be an expensive hobby, since currently Garcia Marquez's works are issued simultaneously by five publishers: Mondadori in Spain, Diana in Mexico, Sudamericana in the Southern Cone, Random House in the United States, and Norma in the countries of the Andean region. Then there are all the translations of his hooks into multiple languages. Manuscripts are another story altogether. Some time ago, the manuscripts of three short stories ("La viuda de Montiel," "La siesta del martes," and "Rosas artificiales") that had been included in the 1962 collection Los funerales de la mama grande turned up after going astray in Mexico--as Garcia Marquez himself tells it--and were put on the market by a US bookseller for $9,500 apiece. In other words, a collector would have had to spend close to $30,000 to own the three manuscripts--a total of just 24 typewritten pages by the Nobel laureate.

Without a doubt, works by Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges have also increased...