Lost Manuscripts Weren't Lost At All

After it reported that two Jorge Luis Borges manuscripts worth nearly $1 million had been lost and presumably stolen, Harvard Square's Lame Duck Books found the manuscripts today hidden in a photograph sleeve in the store itself.

"I felt a kind of sinking feeling of stupidity but great relief," store owner John W. Wronoski said of the moment he discovered the manuscripts.

The manuscripts, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," and "The Library of Babel," had last been seen on Nov. 12 at a fair in Hamburg, Germany and longtime bookstore employee Saúl Roll said he discovered that the manuscripts were missing on Nov. 16.

Wronoski said he found the manuscripts this morning while going through the binders he had brought to Hamburg. The binders contained photographs that Wronoski needed to send to a customer and the photographs were stored within plastic sleeves.

While going through the binder, Wronoski found the missing manuscripts tucked inside the plastic sleeves.

"It ended up in a position that was obscure enough for us not to find it in our frantic efforts over three weeks," Wronoski said. "They could have been there indefinitely."

Wronoski speculated that the manuscripts had ended up in the plastic sleeves while they were being packed up from the Hamburg fair.

"My fear was that I had left [the manuscripts] behind," he said.

Roll said the manuscripts, which Lame Duck has owned for four years, are probably the only original copies of the stories. The “Menard” manuscript was listed in the store's catalogue at $450,000, and the “Babel” script was listed at $500,000.

“Very few literary manuscripts of this stature in any language remain in private hands,” Wronoski wrote in an e-mail to a rare books collectors’ list.

After The Crimson reported today that the manuscripts were missing, Roll said the store was greeted with a host of media requests, including from Fox 25, Reuters, and El Clarín—a major Argentinean newspaper—when he came to work today.

We had to admit "on camera that we're stupid idiots, but [we're] admitting to that with a great degree of relief and happiness," Roll said.

"It doesn't get more surreal than that. This is like a Borges short story," Roll said about the fact that the manuscript was found on the morning that the Crimson' story was published.

—Leon Neyfakh contributed to the reporting for this story.

—Staff writer Stephanie S. Garlow can be reached at sgarlow@fas.harvard.edu.