Books

New York / Bogata: Harper & Row, Alfred A. Knopf, Henry Holt, The Limited Editions Club, Grupo Editorial Norma, 2005. First American Edition. Fine/Fine. A fantastic collection of sixteen first editions, all signed by Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez and all inscribed by him to the same recipient, Richard Mattie. A painstaking exercise in book collecting, undertaken by the resourceful Mattie over a period spanning from 1997 to 2005 with the assistance of a number of contacts in Mexico who had a close connection to the author by which the signatures were obtained. The collection is accompanied by a 1-inch thick folder, titled by Mattie "The Gabriel Garcia Marquez File 1997-2005", in which he has meticulously documented this nearly decade-long collecting venture, preserving every letter, fax, postal receipt, wire and emails (printed out in full). A remarkable collection. All sixteen books are first American editions, with the exception of Vivir para cotarla which is the true…

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a landmark 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the town of Macondo, a fictitious town in the country of Colombia. The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, and it is considered Márquez's magnum opus.

The true first edition was published by Editorial Sudamericana in 1967, in Spanish. It can be identified by the green and black cover with golden lettering and a stylized rooster. The presence of text 'Primera edición' and the lack of further impression or edition statements also indicate a first edition. The UK first edition was in 1970.