“This book by Bush is out of this world. Did you know that he and Gorbachov made a deal?”
“To end the Cold War?”
“No, no, not just that. They also agreed to bring democracy and freedom to the whole world. What happened in Chile—Pinochet’s resignation—was their doing. So was Panama—the fall of Noriega—and everything that happened throughout Eastern Europe—the Prague Spring. A fascinating read.”
Another of the signed copies that Slim shows me is Leadership, by Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York, famous for implementing repressive policies. I barely manage to read the final words in Spanish: “With admiration and friendship,” and then the signature of the author, who is now a security consultant. Near Giuliani’s book is El desacuerdo nacional (The National Disagreement), by Manuel Camacho Solís, the Mexican politician who in 1994 acted as an intermediary between the government and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). Slim reads the dedication to me: “To Carlos Slim, who can see the forest for the trees and turn what he imagines into reality, with my friendship and determined conviction of reaching an agreement to grow with justice.”
We carry on along the bookshelves and he takes out a bound manuscript whose cover says, “Revolutionary Wealth, Alvin Toeffler.”
“Alvin Toeffler asked me to take a look at this before it was published.”
He flicks through the volume, where I notice some handwritten notes in the margins of the greatest contemporary futurologist, who is a friend of Slim’s.
“And did you make any corrections?”
“It has some numbers errors.”
“And did Toffler make the changes?”
“No, because in the end I didn’t get them to him in time.”
Unlike the book Why Nations Fail, of which Sanborns bought the small amount of 700 copies, the Spanish print run of Revolutionary Wealth was bought almost in its entirety by Slim’s chain.
The tour of his library continues, and at some point we are right in front of the book Los retos que enfrentamos (The Challenges We Face), published in 2014 by former president Felipe Calderón, but Slim ignores it. Meanwhile, he picks out with enthusiasm an old volume entitled Desarrollo estabilizador (Stabilizing Development), by Antonio Ortiz Mena, and exclaims:
“This is excellent!”
“What will you do with these books?”
“Do you mean what will my children do with them when I die?”
“Well, you could also do something before then.”
“Do you mean am I going to donate my collection? Nope.”
“Why not give it to the reading library at UNAM?”
“No, we have studies centers.”
“Or the University of Austin. For example, the politician Bill Richardson just donated his library to them.”
“But in the United States, they buy them.”
“True, Gabriel García Márquez’s library was bought there for $2 million.”
“Twelve million?”
“No, $2 million.”
“No, that’s too cheap.”
“And Bill’s?”
“I think he donated it.”
For a brief moment Slim remains silent, as if thinking about what will happen to his books in the future.
But he doesn’t speak further on it.
“I’ve never worn glasses. I’ve been reading with my left eye since I was young.”
“And why did you never get a laser operation?”
“In those days there were no operations.”
“And now?”
“Why would I get operated if I read fine with my left eye?”
“I got the operation a year ago and it changed my life.”
“Sure, but in ten years you’ll be back to where you were.”
“But I will have had ten years of not wearing glasses.”
“Yes, but you’re going to live fifty more. You’ll have a tough time, kid, believe me… No, my eyesight is fine, I can read fine. Let’s see, look, get me something in fine print.”
Holding up some financial documents in fine print, the magnate starts reading out loud to perfection.
I asked two successful businessmen in their thirties, separately, whether they thought it was interesting to know what books Slim has in his library. Despite the generational gap and the fact that they are critical of the billionaire’s dominant role in the business world, both said yes. After I’d mentioned some of the titles, one of them told me he’d started to look for them to read them soon, while the other one was amazed because he didn’t know most of them, despite being an avid reader of books about finance and business strategies. The titles I found in Slim’s library, where the most repeated word was “money,” included Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went, by John Kenneth Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin, 1975); The Money Machine: How KKR Manufactured Power and Profits, by Sarah Barlett (Warner Books, 1991); Paper Money, by Adam Smith (Dell, 1982), Super-Money, by Adam Smith (Random House, 1972), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Penguin, 2009), The Warren Buffett Way: Investment Strategies of the World’s Greatest Investor, by Robert G. Hagstrom (Wiley, 1997), a Spanish edition of The Peter Prescription: How to Make Things Go Right, by Laurence J. Peter (Plaza & Janés, 1991), a Spanish edition of Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation From Stifling People and Strangling Profits, by Robert Townsend (Grijalbo, 1970), and The Money Lords: The Great Finance Capitalists, 1925–1950, by Mathew Joséphson (Weybright and Talley, 1972).
Of all the titles in this section, the one that intrigued me most was a Spanish edition of Winning Through Intimidation, by Robert J. Ringer (V Siglos, 1974), first published in English in 1973. My book dealer told me it would be difficult to find, but he would help me find it for a thousand pesos. I asked the same bookseller how much he thought he could get for a 1960s edition of a book by Getty underlined by Slim; he replied that it would be worth between 50,000 and 100,000 pesos.
I also talked about the list of over 100 books that I identified in the library with Daniel Gershenson, a prominent independent activist and critic of Slim’s monopolistic practices. Gershenson, who lived a large part of his life in New York, was of the opinion that “his selection of titles is quite conventional; indistinguishable from that of any rich dude from Wall Street (a ‘master of the universe,’ as Tom Wolfe would call him), who might also be a baseball or basketball fan.”
Of the dozens of sports books that are also in Slim’s library, Gershenson pointed out that the billionaire had a biography of Ty Cobb, the Detroit Tigers’ player who was nicknamed the Peach of Georgia and considered by experts to be the best baseball player in history, even above the famous Babe Ruth: “Cobb was a cantankerous, confrontationally racist, and belligerent player in Major League Baseball, which was segregated until 1947, when Jackie Robinson—the first black player—was hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Known for his violent tendencies and his spikes-up displays of cruelty in an era when those “character traits” were highly valued, Cobb was a man who, according to North American folklore, twisted the rules and grabbed undue advantages for the sake of achieving his goal: to win at all costs.
A