The Helen Warren DeGolyer Exhibition and
Award for American Bookbinding
2 June-21 July 2006

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986).  Ficciones. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Dos Amigos, 1987.  Illustrated by Gabriela Aberastury, Julio Pagnao, Mirta Ripoll, Raúl Russo, and Alicia Scavino.  Copy number 26 of 42.  26 x 33.5 cm, 184 pp. 

Bridwell Library Special Collections.

The exhibition was a juried show drawn from a competition to design a binding for a book in Bridwell’s Special Collections. The book for the fourth triennial competition was Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones, printed in a limited edition of forty-two at the Argentine fine press Ediciones Dos Amigos.  First published in 1944, Ficciones includes seventeen short prose pieces designed to challenge a reader’s sense of certainty. Largely because of this work, Borges is considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. The Ediciones Dos Amigos edition was begun on August 9, 1984 and completed December 31, 1987.  Samuel César Palui oversaw the edition and signed each copy. The collection of short stories by Borges includes seventeen illustrations by five important Argentine artists: Gabriela Aberastury, Julio Pagnao, Mirta Ripoll, Raúl Russo, and Alicia Scavino. The Bridwell copy is number twenty-six from the private collection of the publisher of Ediciones Dos Amigos, Ernesto Lowenstein.

The 2006 exhibition consisted of both completed example bindings and the proposed designs for Ficciones chosen from competition entries for inclusion by the jury. Bridwell Library has published a full-color catalog of the exhibition.

During the last half of the twentieth century, Helen Warren DeGolyer was a well-known supporter of education and the arts in Dallas. She was also an artist herself, particularly skilled at the art of bookbinding. In 1996, the brother of Mrs. DeGolyer, Joseph Warren, and Mrs. DeGolyer’s children, Everett Lee DeGolyer and Edith DeGolyer, fulfilled her testamentary wishes, and established an endowment to support the Helen Warren DeGolyer Triennial at Bridwell Library. They also donated Mrs. DeGolyer’s collection of fine bindings to Bridwell Library, including over twenty-five of her own design bindings.

About Ficciones

The exhibition itself was free and open to the public from June 2 through July 21, 2006.