In 1976, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg delighted readers with his oddly titled book "Il formaggio e i vermi" (The Cheese and the Worms). Soon becoming a model for cultural history and microhistory, it recreated a 16th-century northern Italian miller's religious beliefs and cosmovision by, among other things, reconstructing his small library and compiling a list of other books he likely read.

Menocchio, as the miller was known, owned a few books and had access to several others, among them Boccaccio's "Decameron" and a book about the adventures of 14th-century English knight Sir John Mandeville.

Book collections and reading lists are, indeed, useful sources for recreating individuals' culture, and perhaps the extent of their knowledge, values and worldview.

A time capsule of sorts, the library I left behind in Puerto Rico in 1986 reveals what I read in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but because the library is mostly composed of books required in courses at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), it also speaks to the university's curriculum and exciting historiographical developments at a time when la Nueva Historia (New History) was at its peak.

Founded in 1903, UPR had the fortune of being forged between two worlds. On the one hand was a combination of European and Spanish intellectual traditions reinforced by numerous exiled anti-fascist Spanish scholars such as Nobel laureate Juan Ramon Jimenez and poet-essayist Pedro Salinas. On the other was the influence of the modern American (meaning U.S.) university. At the same time, UPR was an institution of higher learning in the Latin American tradition — Marxism and all — with a rich measure of insular nationalism.

My offshore library is testimony to UPR's transatlantic genealogical tree — bush, rather — and the multiple intellectual grafts that have enriched it over the decades.

As a humanities student, I was simultaneously exposed to the canon of Spanish literature — Miguel de Cervantes ("Don Quixote"), Lope de Vega ("Fuenteovejuna"), Jose Zorrilla ("Don Juan Tenorio") and Federico Garcia Lorca ("Bodas de Sangre"), among other authors; the canon of U.S. literature — Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway; a healthy dose of works by modern European authors, most of whom I read in English; a book about a man who turned into a cockroach (by Franz Kafka); a book about an entire nation metamorphosing into rhinoceroses (by Eugene Ionesco); and one about a house guest poet who, to the protagonist's chagrin, never wrote a single verse (by Heinrich Boll).

Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and other stellar figures of the 1960s and 1970s Latin American literary boom were widely read at the time. I still hold on to a Spanish-language copy of Garcia Marquez's "No One Writes to the Colonel," which he once deemed his best book (I recall reading it in one sitting) and a copy of Vargas Llosa's "Los Cachorros," which, to my surprise and delight, was set in the Lima neighborhood where I grew up during the 1960s.

Since I majored in history and later pursued a masters in the same field, most of my unexiled collection consists of history books. The pages of many of those published before the 1980s have turned brown and brittle because they hail from a time when printers used acidic additives in paper pulp.

I thumb through profusely underlined copies of books on history and the philosophy of history, among them Spanish-language editions of R.G. Collingwood's "The Idea of History" and Eric Hobsbawm's "Primitive Rebels."

In Puerto Rico, the late 1970s and early 1980s were times of historiographical splendor. Spearheaded by Puerto Rican historian Fernando Pico (my thesis advisor), student of the 19th-century sugar industry Andres Ramos Mattei, labor historian Gervasio Garcia and historian of slave resistance Guillermo Baralt, the period saw a peak in historiographical effervescence, productivity and creativity.

Their works, largely inspired by the French Annales school of history and British and American new social history, broke with traditional Puerto Rican historiography by bringing to the forefront those previously "without history": peasants toiling in the island's highlands; torch-bearing, rebellious slaves; cigarmakers; and other members of the proletariat.

By no means a wealthy institution, UPR offered my generation of students as fine a university education as one could get anywhere in the world, and at $5 to $15 a credit, it was a value hard to beat.

It was there, in a history seminar taught by Pico, that I first heard of Ginzburg and "The Cheese and the Worms." Decades later, only a few years ago, I finally got around to reading it. Tried by the Roman Inquisition for heretical views, an unrepentant Menocchio was burnt at the stake in 1599.

Readers can reach Luis Martinez-Fernandez at [email protected]. To find out more about Luis Martinez-Fernandez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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