One Hundred Years of Solitude [withOUT Exclamation Mark]

New York: Harper and Row, 1970. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. Perhaps greatest Latin American novel of the 20th century--the sort of book where most Spanish speaking booklovers can quote the opening line, "Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo." [Translated here by Gregory Rabassa as "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember than distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."]

In addition to being a great book, this book is a collector's favorite because of the two states of the dust jacket. In some copies, the first sentence of the jacket flap ends with "one of the most important novels ever written in Latin America!" First editions are found with both the exclamation mark and the period. GGM's bibliographer Don Klein has done a lot of work on the question of the exclamation mark and has shown that most if not all of the review copies have the period (See Gabriel García Márquez: Una Bibliografía Descriptiva).

What does that mean? It means that there is not one shred of evidence that the "!" copies are "first", as is often stated by those who have one. It's theoretically possible that the first jackets printed had exclamation marks and that error was fixed during the press run, but such changes are rare on modern, high speed presses like those used in the 1970s.

It's more likely that the printer printed both variants at the same time, with a final printing plate designed to print multiple copies of the jacket at the same time. If that happened, it means the printer made an error and put the "!" mark in; realized their mistake before printing, but didn't fix the problem everywhere. In any case, collectors have long preferred to have the "!" and since it only appears on some copies of the first printing, it is less common than the corrected period copies. First edition (first printing). A very good copy in a very good dust jacket, withOUT the exclamation mark on the front flap. Small owner's name on the front flyleaf, a bit of wear to the jacket at the top of the spine. I bought this copy because it adds a bit more evidence to the idea that the exclamation mark copies were not the first issued. This copy has a small calling card for José Guillermo Castillo (1938-1999) laid in. Castillo has inscribed the card, "con 'complements' muy afectuosos y personales José."

Castillo was a Venezuelan artist who came to New York for the World's Fair in 1964 and stayed a decade. He worked for a time as the literature director of the Center for Inter-American Relations, which supplied funding for translating Latin American literature, including this book. This seems to be one of his "review" copies.

The owner's name on the endpaper is K. S. Wilgus, or Karna S. Wilgus, wife of A. Curtis Wilgus, a professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Florida who was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the board of foreign scholarships in the Office of Inter-American Affairs.

One of Castillo's colleagues, with whom he co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop, said of him, "He's the one who started the boom of Latin American literature in the U.S. by promoting García Márquez and Vargas Llosa" (quoted in "Roundtable: New York Graphic Workshop", September/October 2008 issue of Art on Paper, p. 57.).