Borges Reading Jung

Abstract

ABSTRACT Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote as he read. He made note of important passages in his books to which he might refer later, listing page numbers and ideas in the endpaper pages. As director of the National Library of Argentina, he maintained this same practice with the library books that he read and returned to be reshelved. In 2017, librarians Laura Rosato and Germán Álvarez at the National Library of Argentina published Borges, libros y lecturas, a catalogue of Borges’s marginalia and endpaper notes that they discovered in books in the national collection. These published notes confirm the extent to which Borges read Jung and found in books such as Psychology and Alchemy and Psychology and Religion a lexicon with which to map and describe his private cosmology.