Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) was a Colombian thinker who spent his life among the books of his Bogotá library and published, in the ordinary sense, almost nothing. His life's work took the form of escolios — “scholia,” marginal glosses to a book he never wrote, an “implicit text.” Each is a self-contained aphorism: terse, lapidary, and most often set against the modern world, democracy, and progress, from the vantage of an idiosyncratic, aesthetically saturated Catholic reaction. This edition presents the complete first tome of Nuevos Escolios a un Texto Implícito (1986), each escolio in English with the Spanish original set beneath it.

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How it was made

Like the Baffo edition, this one was assembled with a small toolchain — here carrying a 20th-century Colombian classic into English and setting it in clean bilingual type. The translation is offered for study and private reading; the Spanish text remains authoritative. Start to finish:

1. 1.Nueva Biblioteca Colombiana de Cultura (1986) — the Spanish source — the first tome of Nuevos Escolios a un Texto Implícito, published in Bogotá
2. 2.Claude — translated the escolios from Spanish into English and helped edit and set the bilingual text
3. 3.LuaLaTeX + EB Garamond — typeset each escolio in English above its Spanish original, composed in EB Garamond