From scribes to librarians

By Consuelo Sáizar de la Fuente

In the mid-thirties of the last century, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, two young men, sitting side by side at a precariously balanced table, transcribe in their respective notebooks a book lent to them by a friend who had just returned from Spain, where he had acquired the copy. The title? El romancero gitano, by Federico García Lorca, published on the peninsula in 1928, barely five years earlier.

- We didn't have the money to buy it! -one of them told me a little more than two decades ago, at a lunch at the Fondo de Cultura Económica.

- You leave the money," added the other, "of course we didn't have it, that book was not available in Mexico, neither in bookstores nor in libraries, so we transcribed it so we could read it as many times as we wanted. That's what we usually did with the books we liked," he added, "we almost always copied them by hand, very seldom by typewriter.