Un perro en el grabado de Durero titulado «El caballero, la muerte y el diablo» (A Dog in Durer´s Etching «The Knight, Death and the Devil»)

In 1966 I was working for Galerna, a small publishing house in Buenos Aires. I had almost total freedom, and, full of enthusiasm, I began a brief and ultimately unsuccessful series titled ‘Variations on a Theme’. The idea was to chose a subject by number (it could be anything: a newspaper clipping, a painting…) and offer it to a dozen writers, who would then create their own “variation” of the given topic. For one of the issues, I chose Durer’s etching ‘The Knight, Death, and the Devil’, and among the writers I had asked to write about the topic was Marco Denevi.

Denevi had become famous in Argentina for two books: a magnificent detective novel, badly translated into English as Rose at Ten O'Clock, and a novella, Secret Ceremony, which won the Life magazine’s award for Best Latin-American Short Story in 1960 —and which a delusional Joseph Losey completely distorted in his terrible film adaptation of the same name—.

Barely a day later, Denevi called me back to announce my “order” was ready. I went to his office to collect it (at the time he was working as an insurance broker, dressed in an impeccable black suit) and read the typewritten pages on the bus on my way back. I remember the thrill of the first lines, the enjoyment of the virtuoso performance that revealed itself almost immediately, the joy of the last fifty words that closed the story like a symphonic finale. In all these years, my enthusiasm for this subtly fantastical short story has not decreased. Alberto Manguel

Forty years later, in 2006, Armin Abmeier, the director of the prestigious collection Die Tollen Hefte (“The prodigious notebooks”), invited the illustrator, Max, to participate in his project and gave him carte blanche to illustrate any text he suggested. Max chose the short story by Denevi and offered Media Vaca the opportunity to create an edition in Spanish. The result is this rare and beautiful book, which is not fully Media Vaca but not quite Tollen Hefte either, printed in five direct inks, an unusual system that recovers the ancient practices of the printing craft.