An exile who carried Byron in his suitcase, Emerson in his thoughts, and The Life of Cicero “in the pocket where he kept 50 capsules” hours before his death. Young in Zaragoza and still young in New York, with a “portable” library made up of translations, clippings, quotations, and annotated margins that anticipate the infinite additions Marcel Proust pasted into À la recherche.
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In a letter dated January 1886, he confesses with the tone of intimate superstitions: “Books should always be read with a pen in hand.” Martí wrote with what he read. His ever-unfinished library stood as a writing in flight. “I must have been born on a pile of books,” he also wrote, as Carlos Ripoll recalls in La vida íntima y secreta de José Martí.
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When Guy Davenport imagined Ezra Pound’s library, or Mario Praz described the cabinets of nineteenth-century dandies, they alluded to entire worlds, to systems enclosed in the architecture of the shelves. A similar dynamic can be perceived in the few dozen volumes identified in Martí’s New York library. Although at first glance they might seem scarce for an individual who lived among papers and produced almost 30 volumes of Obras completas, the quantity here is secondary. He built a library with books of an exile, those that accumulate on the shelves of reminiscence, in the lines of his manuscripts.
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There is news of some books in his library. For example, Honoré-Gabriel de Mirabeau’s Erotika Biblion, that banned and philosophical “erotic Bible” that retains the ancient miasma of the French Revolution. Martí found in its pages a rational scandal that challenged both the clergy and the repression of the senses. The inclusion of this book in his “heritage,” far from any whim, testifies to a mind that searched the confines of dogmatic morality for the embers of a deeper freedom. The possession of this volume reveals a reader who was bold in the face of the body, who conceived of the flesh as another form of political writing.
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There were also the classics: Martial with his sarcastic epigrams, Propertius with his elegies of truncated love, sensuality, and lament. Few authors could be imagined further from the decorum of the republican school than these two Latins; yet Martí reread and underlined them. In them he found a Latin foreign to the ecclesiastical: the Latin of desire, of criticism, of satire against power. Do not these same tones resonate in his “Escenas norteamericanas” (North American Scenes)?
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All in all, his wandering library transcended the status of a mere reliquary of the ancient. Martí also housed works that we would today classify as social sciences, such as John Rae’s Contemporary Socialism, whose English copy he filled with annotations. On page 19, according to researchers, Martí wrote several notes in the margin, in an apparent dialogue with Rae, either to correct or supplement him. This was far from a courtesy reading; it was an intellectual crusade. From Rae, he extracted, more than doctrine, the historical pulse of a world in turmoil.
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The second volume of Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, also with profuse handwritten notes, is among his belongings. Martí interpreted Carlyle—prophetic, dense, obsessed with catastrophes—as a mirror image of himself. If Carlyle perceived the Revolution as an indispensable frenzy, Martí perhaps read it as a warning: revolutions are best assessed from the margins of history.
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In his library, every item had a purpose; innocence was foreign to him. Even a modest English-Spanish spelling book, purchased for fifty-five cents and bound in “Russian silk,” was marked with words such as ‘José’ and “Maceo.” That is, it transcended its usefulness as a simple linguistic tool to become a conspiratorial artifact. Martí turned books into coded maps.
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There is an underlying philological curiosity in knowing that among his volumes was one dedicated by Juan de Dios Peza, found in 1927 in a second-hand bookshop by Mercedes Scutch, who donated it to the National Library of Cuba. This gesture—the discovery and the dedication—transforms Martí’s library into a dynamic archive. These are books seeking second and third marriages with other owners, just like the ties of Lord Byron, whom he loved so much.
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There were also books on America. From Cuba primitiva, which he commissioned with zeal, to history and geography textbooks, Martí longed to ground his knowledge in the land. He understood that, in order to liberate any space, it first had to be written, in the manner of Humboldt.
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The shelves of his home in New York were “a cemetery and a nest,” as Mario Praz would say. That realm where extinct civilizations rest and new ideas germinate. In his letters, he requests it clearly: “except for the books on American history, which you will give to Carmita to keep.”
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The portrait painted by Herman Norman in 1891 is presented less as an effigy and more as a visual inscription of the bibliophile in his environment. Martí appears integrated into the symbolic system of the library; there he is the subject who has made the book an organic extension of his thinking. The furniture is functional: the books in the background respond to a logic of work rather than an allegorical intention. The painting encodes an intellectual economy: inkwell, pen, paper, shelves—each element responds to a sequence of discursive production. The paused gesture suggests an interval, moving away from the idea of pure contemplation. Martí’s figure is that of someone interrupting a task, uninterested in posing. Far from constructing a hero or a mystic, this representation outlines a worker of the written word. Here, rather than a symbol of accumulation, the library embodies necessity. As in his correspondence, where he confesses to spending what he does not have on books, the portrait captures the image of someone who lives in a state of reading, and for whom books are at once a tool, an obsession, and a vital body.
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Martí’s bibliophilia is well documented. In a letter to Enrique Estrázulas in 1887 (also quoted by Ripoll), he writes: “If you could see the Consulate now! Two bookshelves, a revolving bookcase, books in the corners. And what books! Last week I bought thirty-three volumes of French theater, Beaumarchais, Diderot, beauty, for—oh, villainy!—two and a half pesos. And today, for three and a half, I bought the entire Parliamentary History of the Revolution, bound in fine leather.” And already in Montecristi, before leaving to meet his island death, he writes to Gonzalo de Quesada: “Those books have been my vice and my luxury, those poor casual books, and books for work. I never had the ones I wanted, nor did I feel I had the right to buy the ones I didn’t need for work.” Eight years and a host of circumstances separate the two letters. Is Martí exaggerating in the first, carried away by the enthusiasm of his discovery, or is he cloaking himself in spontaneous humility in the second? Perhaps the key does not lie in resolving the apparent discrepancy, but in recognizing it as the testimony of someone who is also narrating himself. Could this be a sign of his literary inventiveness, where hyperbole serves both to reveal the euphoria of the bibliophile and the austere image of the hero? Martí, the architect of his prose and his life, may well have chosen to emphasize one facet or the other, leaving us not with a contradiction to resolve, but with the chiaroscuro of his own self-representation. In this, his passion for books is also found in the deliberate modulation of genius.
