There are books that are read and books that are contemplated. “Borges. The collection”published by Alejandro G. Roemmers and Alejandro Vaccaro, belongs to this last category. It is a monumental work that attempts to capture, in more than 500 pages, the dimension of a documentary universe built over more than half a century around the figure of Jorge Luis Borges. The volume brings together a selection of nearly a thousand pieces from a collection that exceeds 30,000 documents and objects linked to the most influential Argentine writer of all time.
The publication was born with a precise ambition, to turn into a book one of the largest and most important Borgesian compilations existing in the world. Original manuscripts, letters, photographs, first editions, magazines, newspaper clippings, personal documents, dedicated books and working papers make up an exceptional archive that allows us to reconstruct the life, work and thoughts of the author of “Fictions” from an unprecedented perspective. All the material was preserved, classified and digitized with the aim of facilitating its consultation and guaranteeing its conservation for future generations.
Behind this cultural company two fundamental names appear. Alejandro Vaccaro, renowned Borgesian researcher, president of the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) and one of the greatest specialists in the life and work of Borges, began collecting materials more than fifty years ago. What began as a personal passion ended up becoming a unique collection due to its magnitude and documentary value. Vaccaro himself usually defines himself as an “involuntary collector,” someone who found essential pieces along the way to understand the writer and who ended up organizing an unprecedented archive.
At his side appears Alejandro Guillermo Roemmersbusinessman, writer, poet and philanthropist, grandson of the founder of Roemmers Laboratories. His bond with Borges has a personal and emotional root. When he was just a teenager, he had the opportunity to read some of his poems to him. Decades later, having become a prominent figure in Argentine culture, he decided to become actively involved in the preservation of the Borgesian legacy. In his own words, he acquired much of this material with the intention of making it available to all Argentines and promoting the creation of a permanent space dedicated to the writer.
The alliance between Vaccaro and Roemmers allowed the collection to grow exponentially. The result is a work that transcends the traditional concept of a catalog. “Borges. The collection” functions as an access door to the author’s intimate universe. Among its pages appear unpublished photographs, correspondence with personalities of world culture, manuscripts that allow us to observe the creative process of some of his most famous texts and documents that illuminate little-known aspects of his intellectual career.
The historical value of the material is immense. Among the highlighted pieces are documents linked to Borges’ positions against anti-Semitism and totalitarianism, letters exchanged with relevant figures in international politics and culture, and graphic testimonies of trips and decisive moments in his life. Each object helps reconstruct the human map behind the literary myth.
The collection has also had a notable international projection. Over the years it was exhibited in highly prestigious academic and cultural institutions, such as King’s College London, the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the National Library of Poland and universities in China and Australia. This global circulation confirms something that the history of literature had already established. Borges belongs to Argentina, but also to the universal cultural heritage.
The work has a prologue by Mario Vargas Llosawho defined the manuscripts gathered in the collection as moving testimonies of the birth of a new literature. The Peruvian Nobel Prize highlighted the way in which these small texts written by a young Borges anticipated an aesthetic revolution that mixed biblical tradition, English literature, Nordic sagas and the Spanish language to give rise to an unrepeatable voice.
In times of rapid consumption and fragmentary reading, “Borges. The collection” proposes a contrary gesture, that of stopping, observing, exploring. It is not simply an accumulation of relics or an exhibition of bibliographical rarities. It is a reference tool, a cartography of the thoughts of a writer who forever transformed literature in the Spanish language. A book that allows us to discover Borges the author, but also Borges the reader, the one who once wrote one of his most memorable phrases: “Let others boast about the books they have written; I am proud of the ones I have read.”
Perhaps therein lies the deep meaning of this publication. Not in preserving the past like a museum piece, but in keeping alive the dialogue with a work that, forty years after Borges’ death, continues to enlighten readers around the world and demonstrate that certain literary labyrinths never have an exit because, fortunately, they never stop being explored.
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