Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] by GARCIA MARQUEZ, GABRIEL - 1967

Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamerica, 1967. First edition. Original wrappers, custom box. Very Good. RARE FIRST EDITION OF GARCIA MARQUEZ'S MASTERPIECE. One Hundred Years of Solitude is "that cultural phenomenon the like of which we see seldom in our times. Here is a great and complex book that, within its covers, includes every possible aspect of human life and, in its art and structure, demonstrates a sophistication and mastery the equal of Melville, Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, or Nabokov at their best. At the same time the book enjoys continued high sales in Colombia, in Latin America, and throughout much of the world. For such a confluence of high art and popular success one needs to go back to the nineteenth century, when entire French families would anxiously await the next installment from Balzac or Hugo, and Yankee audiences would pack the halls in order to see and hear Dickens in the flesh. 

"It would be impossible to overestimate the impact that Garcia Marquez's chronicle has had on the larger reading public. Some statistics and anecdotes should suffice to convey the extent of its influence. When the Argentine publisher Editorial Sudamericana issued the first edition of Cien años de soledad in 1967, initial projections were of gradual sales of ten thousand copies and an annual trickle thereafter. As it happened, the first printing of eight thousand copies sold out in a week, all of them at subway station newsstands in Buenos Aires. Soon the novel was taking the continent by storm, and to this day the pace has not abated, the number of copies sold in the Hispanic world long ago having surpassed the ten million mark" (Bell-Villada, Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work).

 Note: There is a handsome inscription dated 1967 on the front free endpaper. We have not been able to identify whose it is, but it is not in the hand of Garcia Marquez. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamerica, 1967. Octavo, original illustrated wrappers; custom box. Inscription on front free endpaper. Some creasing and soiling to spine and rear panel; usual light toning around text block edges. An exceptionally well-preserved copy of a notoriously rare and fragile book.