Gemma Bastida I Málaga, (EFE).- The Spanish retiree Rubén Acedo went ahead of the National Library and acquired in February an unpublished manuscript of the Nobel Prize winner for Literature José Echegaray that had remained for two decades in the house of a Huelva antique dealer without anyone being interested for him, a document that he has now put in a safe place and does not intend to sell.
On February 2, an article published in El País put Acedo, an 85-year-old Basque who lives between Malaga and Caracas (Venezuela), on the trail of this original, a theater comedy that José Echegaray wrote in 1904. , five months before winning the Nobel, entitled “Don Fernando el Llamado”.
That same day, Acedo, who is an early riser, contacted the antiques dealer Marta Micaela Fernández de Navarrete by phone, who sells books and documents electronically from her home in Puebla de Guzmán (Huelva), and quickly reached an agreement to buy the manuscript for 2,200 euros.
Although the price he had seen published in the press was 1,600 euros, which he thought was “very affordable”, Acedo agreed without question to pay those 600 euros more for the work: “Those things are not bargained for for me,” he says in a interview with EFE.
Faster than the National Library
“I sent her the money, she sent me the manuscript and two or three days later she already had it at home,” explains this retiree, who was faster than the National Library of Spain (BNE) when it came to getting hold of the work. The institution contacted the antiques dealer “within a few hours” of reading the news in the press, but the bookseller informed them that it had already been sold.
“I figured out how to find the antiques dealer and I was effective: I called the town hall, they gave me her phone number, I called her and we negotiated, as simple as that. The opportunity presented itself to me and I took advantage of it urgently, ”says the new owner of the book, which he has kept in a secret place.
Although he is not a collector, Rubén Acedo wanted to buy the work because its story caught his attention “enormously” and because he was “very interested in the author, an important person in the history of Spain” such as Echegaray, who in addition to being a playwright was an engineer, politician and mathematician.
A “deviled” letter
Acedo is enthusiastic about the acquisition of the book, which has a hundred pages, and has already begun to read it, with the help of a magnifying glass, because the print is small, not without some difficulty.
And it is that Echegaray had “a devilish handwriting,” says Acedo, who patiently tries to decipher each word of the author, although some of them resist him. “I understand a lot and I can reconstruct a lot,” jokes the old man, who doesn’t rule out signing up for a graphology course to make it easier for him to complete the words he doesn’t understand.
“It’s costing me, but I’m going to manage to read it. Often you have to use logic to understand what it says,” says the retiree, who as a teacher who has been in high school and university and founder of a school in Venezuela, where he emigrated to when he was young, is used to reading “all kinds of texts manuscripts”.
“You have to look for the morphology of the letter and in those words that you don’t understand, see the letter compared to another that you do understand, and go about completing, guessing, recreating, whatever you want to say, the words. It is a very slow way of reading, unique in all the time of my life, but I am very happy with it”, he relates.
Original saved in “a place in Malaga”
Acedo points out, in any case, that the original is kept safe “in a place in Málaga” and that he works with a copy that he can touch and in which he makes his annotations: “The original is not handled, I do so.” respect,” he stresses.
Once you have managed to read the manuscript, you still do not know where it will end up deposited. He is considering the possibility of continuing to keep it as “a family treasure”, but he is also considering taking it to the library of his school in Caracas, Yale College, or leaving it in the library of his hometown, Oteo, located in the mountains of Alava.
What Rubén Acedo is clear about is that the work is not for sale: “I have little life left and I don’t know what my children will do, maybe they think better than me, but I am not going to sell it because for me it is not a matter of money, it is a matter of having a historical relic from a country I love.”
Book Market Scrutiny
The National Library of Spain, therefore, will not have the possibility of acquiring the book for now, despite having openly shown its interest in it.
Sources from the Acquisitions Department of this institution have told EFE that they were not aware of the existence of this document because “at no time did the bookstore contact” the BNE to offer the manuscript.
To select the pieces that are of interest to you, the National Library keeps track of what comes out on the book market, both through the catalogs that come from the booksellers themselves and from the auction houses, but in this case “not No news was received about it.”
The BNE assures that it is always interested in rescuing works of this type because the institution tries to avoid the dispersal of documents and assets, since this “is one of the main causes of their deterioration” and disappearance.
For this reason, when the BNE learns of a document of great patrimonial interest, it informs its owner to analyze the suitability and authenticity of the piece and initiate the purchase process.
This was done in the case of the Echegaray manuscript, although the document had already been sold only a few hours before. EFE