Wilson Library Rare Book Collection celebrates José María Vargas Vila’s 150th birthday

The Wilson Library Rare Book Collection celebrated Colombian author José María Vargas Vila’s 150th birthday Thursday with a lecture, as they launched a digital collection of his works.

The lecture, “Vargas Vila: 150 Years of Clamorous Solitude,” was presented by UNC romance languages professor Juan Carlos González-Espitia. He read Vila’s works in his childhood and kept an interest in the author throughout his life.

Espitia said that when he came to UNC, he immediately checked the libraries for Vila’s works.

He said he was impressed when he found a large collection already gathered. Since then, he has worked with the Latin American librarians to raise funds for more books.

UNC currently has one of the world’s largest collections of the author’s works.

“We have been able to put together a collection that is incredible,” Espitia said. “When that happened, we thought about the technology and the fact that here we have the people from the Internet archive, and then we decided, well, this is a great project to put on for many people because his books are very difficult to find.”

The Rare Books Collection digitized Vila’s books to create a comprehensive website.

“We are doing the work of democratizing knowledge,” Espitia said. “That’s one of the most important things a public university can do. Especially knowledge that has been almost lost, but people are still so interested about it.”

Claudia Funke, curator of the Rare Book Collection, hopes to revive Vila’s works through the free and publicly available online collection.

“It’s really interesting to have these forgotten works all collected together on the website,” she said. “It’s just like you’re looking at the real book.”

Although Vila was immensely popular in his time, he is not well known now.

“It’s not that he’s forgotten, it is like a ghost,” Espitia said. “He’s not there, but he has been there all the time.”

Many people who attended the event were not familiar with Vila. Emily Clark and Sam Krieg, graduate students at UNC studying Spanish, attended the event knowing about Vila only from the event fliers.

Sophomore peace, war and defense major Jack Howard had to attend an event during Hispanic Heritage Month for his Spanish class. He chose the Vila lecture with no prior knowledge of the author.

“It just seemed like an incredible story,” Howard said. He added that he might read some of the catalogued works.

Despite an audience that did not know of Vila before, Espitia is hopeful that more people will use the website to read Vila’s books.

“It will serve as a linkage between generations,” he said. “The two last generations, they knew a lot about Vila. Of course things have been lost. But I think putting him here in a digital era and open to the public will make him better known.”

Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.