Almost three thousand copies that make up the private collection that author Gabriel García Márquez
gathered throughout his life were donated last week by his widow, Mercedes Barcha, to the Bank of the Republic of Colombia.
The collection includes the writer’s own literary work, among which are several first editions and translations to more than 43 languages of books like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and other classics written by the Colombia native.
The widow of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, donated the personal collection that Gabo
built from his own work and will soon be incorporated into the collections of the Luis Ángel Arango Library of Colombia, where there is already an important literature collection, which includes editions of the most representative writers of that nation, not only in Spanish but in other languages.
The donation is made up of almost three thousand copies, corresponding to 1,102 editions of his novels, stories, chronicles, scripts, journalistic work, speeches and essays.
The decision was announced during an event chaired by the Board of Directors of the Banco de la República in Santa Marta where the new name of the library of that city will be: Gabriel García Márquez Library.
The intention is that this important collection be preserved in Colombia. After the regular cataloging process, said in a statement the Bank of the Republic, these copies will become part of the collection of the Rare Book Room and
Manuscripts of the Luis Ángel Arango Library, which houses personal archives and collections of several prominent intellectuals of Colombia.
In that locale there are already 500 editions of the work of the Nobel winner, the great majority in Spanish.
Source: El Universal
