León Felipe, cover drawing and typesetting by Vicente Rojo.

[Rojo’s first book] Macbeth, o el Asesino del Sueño. Paráfrasis de la Tragedia de Shakespeare [anti-authoritarian reinterpretation; first edition]

Mexico City: Librería Madero, 1954. In wraps. 46 pp. 12 ¼ x 8 in. Very good. Item #10526

The first book cover designed by Vicente Rojo, who would go on to reinvent the visual style of Mexican book design and create the now famous cover of the first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. This is the first edition of anti-fascist Spanish exile writer and poet León Felipe’s influential reinterpretation of Macbeth, and the very first book printed by the legendary printing press, Imprenta Madero, still here under the name of the bookstore in which it started, Librería Madero. Librería Madero published one other book in 1954, its first year in operation as a press; Macbeth was the first of the two, and was given to friends and colleaugues as a New Years’ gift on January 1, 1954. 

León Felipe, already an established poet when the Spanish Civil War began, served in the Republican Army, and in 1938 fled into exile in Mexico. His work took a political turn and often reflected on authoritarianism and fascism; the scholar Keith Gregor wrote that this reinterpretation of Macbeth was an “attack on the tyranny – both political and aesthetic – still prevailing in the artist’s homeland.” Several of Felipe’s poems were found in Che Guevara’s journal when he was captured and subsequently executed in Bolivia. Felipe’s adaptation of Macbeth, published for the first time in this edition, became a significant work in the Spanish-language theater, as its anti-authoritarian themes became increasingly germane to the political situation in Latin America; it was staged across the region on dozens of occasions and reprinted several times over the following decades. 

The first printing of an important work of 20th century Spanish language theater - and the very first book designed by Vicente Rojo. OCLC locates nine holdings, with five in the United States, as of March 2026. 

Price: $750.00