In 1966 I was working for Galerna, a small publishing company in Buenos Aires. I had almost total freedom and, full of enthusiasm, I set up a short, and ultimately unsuccessful, series called "Variations on a Theme". The idea was to choose on subject per volume (the subject might be anything: a newspaper clipping, a painting) and offer it to a dozen writers who would then make their own "variation" on that given theme. For one of the volumes, I chose Durer's engraving "The Knight, Death, and the Devil;" among the authors I asked to write on the theme was Marco Denevi.

Denevi had become famous in Argentina through two books: a superb detective novel badly translated into English as Rose at Ten O'Clock, and a novella, Secret Ceremony, which won Life magazine's prize for the best Latin-American short story in 1960- and which was then completely changed by a Joseph Losey gone haywire in his terrible film of the same name.

Denevi called me back barely a day later and said that my "order" was ready. I went to his office to collect it (he was then working as an insurance broker, dressed in impeccable black) and I read the typewritten pages on the bus on my way back home. I remember the thrill of the first lines, the enjoyment of the virtuoso performance that revealed itself almost immediately, the happiness of the last fifty words that round up the story like a symphonic finale. In all these years, my enthusiasm for this subtle, fantastic tale has not waned.

Alberto Manguel http://www.101bananas.com/library/dogdurer.html

In 2006, forty years later, Armin Abmeier, director of the prestigious collection Die Tollen Hefte (The prodigious notebooks), invited the illustrator, Max, to participate in his project and give him carte blanche to illustrate the text that he suggested. Max chose the story by Denevi and offered Media Vaca the possibility to create an edition in the Spanish language. The result is this precious, rare little book, which does not look like Media Vaca; and which also does not exactly appear to be a Tolle Heft either; its printing process has been personally supervised by the artist and the German publisher and it has been printed in five direct inks, an unusual system which recovers the ancient practices of the printing craft.

--