Nora C. Benedict's "Borges and the Literary Marketplace"

Nora C. Benedict is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Digital Humanities in the Romance Languages Department at the University of Georgia. Before arriving in Athens, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University.

Benedict applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Borges and the Literary Marketplace: How Editorial Practices Shaped Cosmopolitan Reading, and reported the following:

Page 99 appears toward the end of the third chapter, “Borges as Critic and Collaborator,” and does not present the reader with narrative prose, but rather a table. More precisely, the table in question charts the overlaps in authors among Borges’s reviews (in the ladies’ magazine El Hogar and the literary journal Sur) and his later publications on fantastic literature and detective fiction (Antología de la literatura fantástica, Los mejores cuentos policiales, and the series “Séptimo Círculo”). The twenty-seven named authors, including Graham Greene, María Luisa Bombal, Georges Simenon, and Franz Kafka, illustrate Borges’s unique literary tastes and his worldly reading habits.

In a strange way, I think that page 99 gives readers a really good sense of what they will find in my book for several reasons. First, much of my analysis of Borges’s varying jobs in the publishing industry is data-driven, which is reflected in the organization of information in the table on this page. Second, the actual contents of the table showcase not only the variety of writers whose work Borges edited and published, but also the disparate venues for which Borges worked. Third, we can begin to see how Borges targeted specific audiences and marketed his edited volumes. That is to say, in this table we can identify overlaps between his reviews of certain works in the 1930s and his publication of either these same works or others by the same authors in his edited collections and anthologies during the 1940s.

Even though I found the Page 99 Test illuminating, it does not touch on the aesthetics of the books that Borges produced during the 1930s and 1940s, which is an important aspect of my book. In particular, I discuss the physical attributes of his works in great detail—from cover illustrations and bindings to typography and paper—as a way to understand his interactions with the book as object. Moreover, I highlight the relationships that Borges developed with visual artists, like Attilio Rossi, as well as linotypists and press operators, to reveal his own training in book production and design.

Visit Nora C. Benedict's website.

--Marshal Zeringue