The utter magic of the first novel

The book is a magical object as it is essentially technology that allows a reader to read the mind of a writer, no matter how far away she or he may be in distance or time. The book is a special magical object when the mind one is reading is that of Miguel de Cervantes, the father of the modern novel (in any language), and that too of an edition produced during Cervantes' time. Sotheby's is putting the set of the two-part novel, Don Quixote a.k.a. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (the first part being a 1608 third edition, the second a 1615 first edition) along with a first edition of his 1613 short story collection, Exemplary Novels, under the hammer. The books are expected to fetch ₹900,000 - about ₹7.29 crore - when auctioned in Paris in December.

This has been a good year for Cervantes fans. In 2012, a 1930s Sanskrit translation by two Kashmiri Pandits, Nityanand Shastri and Jagadhhar Zadoo, from an 18th-century English translation gathering dust in a Harvard University library was discovered. A new edition of that dual English-Sanskrit Don Quixote was published and presented at the Intituto Cervantes in July this year. As the man from La Mancha says, 'There is no book so bad... that it does not have something good in it.' And, in the case of the 17th-century Don Quixote editions, they are truly magical.