Borges Writings Turn Up in Store

After reporting that two Jorge Luis Borges manuscripts worth nearly $1 million had been lost and presumably stolen, Harvard Square’s Lame Duck Books found them yesterday hidden in a photograph sleeve in the store itself.

“I felt a kind of sinking feeling of stupidity but great relief,” store owner John W. Wronoski said of the moment he discovered the manuscripts.

The texts, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” and “The Library of Babel,” had last been seen on Nov. 12 at a fair in Hamburg, Germany, and longtime bookstore employee Saúl Roll said he discovered that the manuscripts were missing on Nov. 16 after he returned to Cambridge.

Wronoski said he found the manuscripts yesterday morning while going through the binders he had brought to Hamburg. The binders contained photographs that Wronoski needed to send to a customer and the photographs were stored within plastic sleeves.

While going through the binder, Wronoski found the missing manuscripts tucked inside the sleeves.

“It ended up in a position that was obscure enough for us not to find it in our frantic efforts over three weeks,” Wronoski said. “They could have been there indefinitely.”

Wronoski speculated that the manuscripts had ended up in the plastic sleeves while they were packing up from the Hamburg fair.

“My fear was that I had left [the manuscripts] behind,” he said.

Roll said the manuscripts, which Lame Duck has owned for four years, are probably the only original copies of the stories. The “Menard” manuscript was listed in the store’s catalogue at $450,000, and the “Babel” script was listed at $500,000.

After realizing on Nov. 16 that the manuscripts were missing, Roll said the store filed reports on Nov. 17 with the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) and the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol).

CPD spokesman Frank T. Pasquarello did not return requests for comment.

The missing manuscripts, which were first published in 1939, are two of Borges’ most influential stories.

“Very few literary manuscripts of this stature in any language remain in private hands,” Wronoski wrote in an e-mail to a rare books collectors’ list.

After The Crimson reported yesterday that the manuscripts were missing, Roll said he was greeted with a host of media requests when he arrived at work today.

The Associated Press, Reuters, The Boston Globe, and El Clarín—a major Argentinean newspaper—have all covered the rediscovery of the manuscripts.

We had to admit “on camera that we’re stupid idiots, but [we’re] admitting to that with a great degree of relief and happiness,” Roll said.

“It doesn’t get more surreal than that. This is like a Borges short story,” Roll said about the fact that the manuscript was found on the day the Crimson story was published.

Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Mariano Siskind, whose specialities include 20th century Latin American literature, said Borges would have liked the mystery surrounding the manuscripts’ disappearance.

“He would have been more interested if it had triggered a real mystery or detective story, but this looks more like material for a nonsense parody of a detective story,” Siskind said.

—Leon Neyfakh contributed to the reporting for this story.

—Staff writer Stephanie S. Garlow can be reached at sgarlow@fas.harvard.edu.