'The Balance', the fastest sold out book in history, incinerated by the fire of April 9, 1948

The first time I knew it was because of a documentary that I found on Youtube, quite rudimentary. In it, a vital Álvaro Mutis, already gray-haired and moustached, said he was the writer with the record of having sold out 200 copies of a book in less than an hour. He laughed as he told it. The reason for that “record” was later explained to me by Juan Camilo Rincón, the author of “Journey to the Heart of Cortázar”. He told me that it was because of the fires of April 9, 1948, a fact that was later corroborated by bookseller Álvaro Castillo Granada. The book had been published just by that date and as soon as it was exhibited in bookstores, just a few minutes after Jorge Eliécer Gaitan was shot in the center of the city, it was quickly consumed by the fires of the El Bogotazo fires. In an article published by El Espectador, Rincón says: “In an interview with Fernando Quiroz, Álvaro Mutis says that: “The success of La balanza (as the book was called) is unprecedented in Colombian literature. On April 8, we distributed the edition in the main bookstores in downtown Bogotá, and the next day there was not a single book left. The edition sold out in a matter of hours... by incineration.”

The Balance was the first book published by Mutis. He wrote it at the age of 24, together with Carlos Pariño Roselli. The edition had illustrations by Hernando Tejada and could not even be read. Obviously, it sold out in minutes, but not because they bought it, but because it burned. Having passed 74 years since then, he asked Santiago Mutis Durán, the writer's son, about this episode. “Our April 9 is not over yet, nor did it begin that day. I am not in favour of leaving that first book of The Balance between the Flames, because that is just another flash of hell. But the anecdote, which has been taken with laughter, serves to make a different reading of Mutis's poetry, and to see it as a poetry that is tremendously critical of Colombian society, which has been rotting. I don't know of another more fierce and lucid criticism among us, and yet it leaves us with a beautiful and powerful language to survive our own misfortune,” he says.

The collection of poems was published again in 1997, in a facsimile edition and despite the fact that it lost the charm of the first one, it retained the ghost of its predecessor. It was a burnt book. One day, I was reading about Mutis's work, when in 2018 I wrote about him, and I came across an interview in which he detailed certain details of the writing of that book, details with which he, some time later, disagreed. He considered that these poems were just a glimpse of someone who wanted to be a good poet. And he talked, among other things, about the Bogotá of those days and how much the country was marked, in literary matters, by the decline of the liberal leader.

Recently, the publishing house Palabra Libre published the book Colombia y Mexico. Between blood and word, in which the Colombian journalist and writer recalls this episode in two different passages. The chapter he dedicates to Álvaro Mutis and the interview his son does with him. Needless to mention, I was present at that meeting and I am even part of the book, almost without wanting to. The fragment, endowed with that fluid pen that the Colombian has, recounts:

“Álvaro Mutis's love for poetry was born in his youth when, while studying high school at the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario, the Colombian poet Eduardo Carranza made him a staunch supporter of the genre. Together with Carlos Patiño, he published in February 1948 his first title, La balanza, which had a print run of only 200 copies. Mutis had some laughter, which is one of the most rapidly sold out Colombian books in bookstores, as its copies arrived at the points of sale on April 8, to be consumed the next day by the Bogotazo fire. Despite this, the drafts and some copies survived and circulated among his friends and acquaintances, reaching renowned poets and critics such as Aurelio Arturo, Alberto Zalamea, Hernando Tellez and Eduardo Carranza, who gave laudable reviews in newspapers and magazines such as Semana and El Tiempo, which led Mutis to be included in the generation of The quadernícolas.

(...)

From the interview with Santiago Mutis:

SDB file. How was the experience - I don't know if he ever told you about it, there are fragments of interviews, documentaries where he tells it a little - from his first book of poetry?

S.M.: I think we have sacrificed that first book in the candle; we threw it into the fire with April 9 and it turns out that it is a great nonsense. For telling an anecdote in the interview, he says it: “It was published and burned...”; yes, but what is happening in his poetry is what is warning will happen. And it is not enough to be a book; it is a plaque; it is very little. They don't take out the book, they take out the plaque, they finance it themselves. Carlos Patiño Roselli, he and Tejada take out the little book, it disappears and that's it; absolutely nothing happens. What had happened was all the relationship between friends, of saying about other people, texts published here and there... yes. And that's what I've also tried to pick up in things from him. That is earlier, or it is the same time, but seen that way, it has a dissemination or at least a greater reading.

Twenty books arrived from La Scala no more, and that sinks, disappears, and will come out later in The Elements of the Disaster that is published outside the country, in Buenos Aires. It is a very interesting anecdote about the candela, the burning of La Balanza, but it closes the door of really knowing what was about to happen and what didn't happen, but that continues because he keeps talking and writing; it's in the supplements, in the newspapers, in the conversations. The relationship that is being made with Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, with Hernando Tellez, is more important than the publication of the poem itself. And I don't think anyone understands it; that is a cryptic thing, closed, of a matter that is half fermented, terrible.”

In the editions that circulate today with the complete poetry of Álvaro Mutis, it is possible to attend the reading of La balanza, at least some of his poems. Perhaps the most beautiful encounter that a reader could have with these words is through coincidence. To find, by accident or by chance, the ashes of what this poetry was, and reading them aloud, feeling the embers burning and remembering that not only people were victims of that unfortunate episode of April 9, 1948, but also art, books. García Márquez himself lost a good part of the manuscript he was working on at the time, in addition to his typewriter. Even today we are trying to recover the historical and cultural memory that was lost that day. The important thing is not to let us get lost too.

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