BORGES, Jorge Luis.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

El Aleph. Second edition, presentation copy, inscribed by Borges on the front free endpaper, "A la senora Leadbitter, con admiración y amistad, Jorge Luis Borges, Buenos Aires, 1955". The recipient was Anna Lisa Leadbitter (neé Hahne-Johansson), whose husband Jasper Michael Leadbitter OBE was British consul to Argentina in the 1950s.Borges inscribed this copy in the same year he became director of the Biblioteca Nacional in Beunos Aires, soon after losing his eyesight. He discussed this state of affairs in "Poem of the Gifts" and later remarked upon it, "I speak of God's splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness" (cited in Monegal, p. 431).El Aleph (1949) is one of Borges's major story collections, including "the culmination of Borges's art" in "El inmortal" and among "his strangest and most complex" stories in "El Aleph" (Christ, p. 49; Monegal, p. 314). This expanded edition includes an additional four stories and Borges's new postscript discussing them.

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