Draft of the work “Historias de Cronopios y de Famas” by Julio Cortázar is auctioned

A bunch of sixty-year-old leaves held together by metal fasteners with the inscription “Julio Cortázar. Stories of Cronopios and Famas. Paris. 1952″ was auctioned on Thursday in Montevideo with seven unpublished stories.

The 60 yellowed sheets of 28.5 x 22.8 centimeters typed on a typewriter contain 46 literary essays that are the heart of the famous book by the Argentine writer Cortázar written shortly after arriving in Paris.

Of them, 35 were published in 1962 in the first edition of “Historias de Cronopios y de Famas”. Some were printed exactly the same as the draft found in Montevideo last year and others had editing changes. Three other stories were known in magazines while Cortázar was alive.

But the remaining seven are unpublished: “Inventory”, “Letter from one fame to another fame”, “Automatic Butterflies”, “Travel and Dreams”, “Tiny Unicorn”, “Mirror Rage” and “King of the Sea” .

The auction, run by the Zorrilla house of Montevideo in association with the art antique dealer Hilario of Buenos Aires, had a base value of 12,000 US dollars. But An Argentine buyer, who participated by telephone, took it for $36,000.

In 1952 Julio Cortázar sent from Paris to Buenos Aires a writing with the title “Historias de Cronopios y Famas” to Luis María Baudizzone, head of the Argos publishing house. The editor was a friend of the Argentine writer, at that time unaware that he had only published his first novel, “Bestiario”, and he was 37 years old. The editor did not even respond, at least as far as Cortazarian historiographers know.

“These little tales of cronopios and fame have been my great comrades in Paris. I wrote them down on the street, in the cafes, and only two or three make it past one face,” Cortázar wrote in October 1952 to his friend Eduardo Jonquiéres. In the same letter, he informed her that he had sent a typewritten copy to Baudizzone.

More than half a century later, that draft began to be studied by specialists because the son of a book collector, who died in Montevideo, found it at the end of a box with other materials.

“It was something that was lost,” explained Roberto Vega, head of the Hilario auction house, to The Associated Press. “The book was in an uninventory box. It could have happened that the collector died and the things went who knows where. It could perfectly have been lost,” said this auctioneer who only compares the discovery with another manuscript by Jorge Luis Borges that passed through his hands.

Vega assumes that Cortázar “lost track of the manuscript” after sending it to Baudizzone. “The manuscript is lost. Then what happens is that the Río de la Plata does not separate Argentina from Uruguay, but unites it. There was always circulation among intellectuals, collectors and researchers,” he said.

The collector’s family, who requested anonymity from the auctioneers, does not know how Cortázar’s text arrived in the deceased’s collection, which he treasured in silence. The heir contacted Lucio Aquilanti, an antiquarian bookseller from Buenos Aires, also a relevant bibliographer of Cortázar, who confirmed the originality of the piece.

Among other reasons, due to the typography and the impact of the Royal typewriter that Cortazar used for years. The auctioned document “has all the paper with traces of the impact of that typewriter,” Vega explained to the AP.

The antique dealer says that since last week he has not stopped answering questions about the piece from America and Europe, from institutions, collectors and researchers. Vega says that there are manuscripts by other Latin American writers, but “very few originals of Cortázar have been sold,” he remarked.