It's me, Júlio Cesar...

More than 2M books sold, and 55 editions to date on the native tongue of his author. Malba Tahan's "The man who counted (A collection of mathematical adventures" was a hit by pretty much any metric; it fed the abstract fantasies on math of thousands of teenagers.

But Malba Tahan didn't exist. He was a product of the imagination of Júlio César de Mello e Souza, native of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

At age 23, when Júlio Cesar was a frequent writer at O imparcial newspaper, he gave to his editor five short tales with the hope of those making the printed edition. The stories remained on his editor's desk several days without any reaction, and then Julio took the manuscripts back, only to bring them in some days later (after deciding to attribute those to a ficticious american writer named R.S. Slade). The cherry on the pie was claiming that the stories were being quite succesful in New York. It took only one day to have "The Jew's revenge" published, with some other stories getting published using the same trick.

Once Julio learned how to operate in that 1918 Brazil, he was able to get his masterwork published using the pseudonym Malba Tahan.. and the rest is history.

I have to wonder, how much is this cloud of low self-respect still present over the heads of latins in today's world? Somehow Guillermo Puertas Nieto, Lorenzo Elizondo, Jorge Arbusto doen't sound quite as impactful as Bill Gates, Larry Elison and George Bush.