the stolen borges: an ignominious story about the illegal antiquarian book trade (and so much like a pastiche of a certain type of novel it is scarcely believable for 2014.)

some excerpts:

Before he filed the report, Casares called Juan Manuel Peña to warn him that a book from his collection had been stolen from the library. Instead of thanking him, Peña begged him to hide it. The Library had not yet paid him for the books, which he had already delivered, and a scandal could ruin his chances of getting the money. Casares, determined to do the right thing, talked to Alejandro Vaccaro, the Borges specialist, who understood the seriousness of the matter and offered to go with him to explain it to the director of the National Library, Francisco Delich.

They got an audience, but, just like Peña, the director did not seem to welcome the news. First, Delich and a couple of library employees denied that the copy had been stolen—it was, they said, stuck in Portugal as part of a traveling exhibition about Borges. (Much later, a library employee confirmed that, for budgetary issues, the Argentine government took three years to repatriate that exhibition.) Also, the library had never properly catalogued the book before sending it off in the exhibition, which made it hard to confirm it was the same copy.

Exasperated, Casares demanded that the police be told, and that they raid Billinghurst’s apartment immediately to recover the book. But the employees only went as far as to initiate an internal inquiry.

Years passed. Billinghurst had already died of liver disease by the time the internal inquiry confirmed that the copy of Fervor had, in effect, disappeared. Casares was summoned to the Ministry of Education to confirm his theft report. The bureaucrat that took his statement warned him: “If you ratify this, it will get to the federal justice.” And so it did. The officers at the federal court of Judge Jorge Ballestero were used to dealing with drugs and government corruption; they didn’t quite understand the gravity of the matter. After all, this was not a manuscript or a unique copy—it was a printed book, one of many. Even if it had Borges’s handwriting in it, what, really, was its importance?