Libros De Mario -
As the franchise matured, so did its literature. The modern era of libros de Mario includes the massive "Super Mario Bros. Encyclopedia" (originally Super Mario Bros. Hyakka in Japan). This 256-page tome is a brick of knowledge. It catalogs every enemy, every power-up, and every world from Donkey Kong to Super Mario Galaxy.
For Spanish collectors, the "Super Mario: Enciclopedia" is a coffee-table bible. It treats the franchise with the same seriousness as a mythology from ancient Greece. The "libros de arte" (art books) like The Art of Super Mario Odyssey offer high-resolution prints of concept art, showing how the Cap Kingdom or the Luncheon Kingdom evolved from a sketch to a 3D playground.
Mario was not a wealthy man. He lived in a small, rented apartment above a bakery on Calle de los Sueños, where the smell of warm bread softened the sharp edges of the morning. He owned three mismatched chairs, a table that wobbled unless you put a matchbook under one leg, and exactly 2,203 books.
The books were everywhere. They formed lopsided towers beside his bed, filled the bathtub (which he never used for bathing), and created a narrow, winding path from the front door to his reading nook by the window. His neighbors, Mrs. Castellano and young Tomás, called the apartment la biblioteca del loco—the madman’s library.
Every night, Mario did something peculiar. After the bakery below closed and the street grew quiet, he would pick one book from the piles. He wouldn’t read it, not in the usual way. Instead, he would hold it to his chest, close his eyes, and whisper the title into the spine.
"Cien años de soledad," he whispered on Monday.
"El principito," he whispered on Tuesday.
"Ficciones," on Wednesday.
His late wife, Elena, had been a librarian. When she was alive, they would spend evenings arguing about characters as if they were unruly relatives. After she passed, Mario discovered he couldn't bear to read new stories—they felt like betrayals. So he made a ritual of remembering the old ones. Each book he whispered to contained not just words, but a memory: the afternoon he read Neruda aloud in the park, the rainy Sunday when Elena laughed so hard at Don Quixote she dropped her tea, the dog-eared copy of Pedro Páramo they found together in a forgotten bookshop in Oaxaca.
One evening, young Tomás from downstairs knocked on the door. He was ten, curious, and had been warned by his mother to stay away from "the crazy book man." libros de mario
“Señor Mario,” Tomás said, peeking at the stacks. “My teacher says we have to read a book for school. But I hate reading. It’s boring.”
Mario looked at the boy for a long time. Then he smiled—a rare, cracked thing.
“Boring?” he said. “Come in. But watch your step.”
He led Tomás through the labyrinth, past crumbling encyclopedias and paperback mysteries, until they reached a small, dust-covered shelf in the darkest corner. These were the libros de Mario that no one else knew about: not the classics, not the prize-winners, but the ones he had written himself.
Each was a hand-bound notebook, filled with Elena’s recipes, her grocery lists, the silly poems she wrote on napkins, and the date of their first kiss (March 12, 1987). Mario had copied everything by hand after she died, turning her ordinary life into a hundred small books.
He pulled one down. It was labeled Sopa de Lentejas – Jueves.
“This one,” Mario said, handing it to Tomás. “It’s about a woman who made soup so good it could stop time.”
Tomás opened it. The pages were yellowed, the handwriting shaky. He read the first line: “Elena added the garlic first, because she said patience was for saints and statues.”
The boy looked up. “Is this real?”
“More real than anything on those other shelves,” Mario said.
Tomás took the book home. He returned it the next evening, and asked for another. Then another. Soon, he was coming every day after school. He didn’t just read the libros de Mario—he listened to Mario tell the stories behind them: how Elena burned the rice on their anniversary, how she once hid a love letter inside a copy of The Little Prince, how she believed that every person was a book waiting to be opened.
Months later, Tomás’s class had a show-and-tell. He brought Sopa de Lentejas – Jueves. He stood in front of his classmates, who expected video games or soccer cards, and said:
“This is a book about love. It doesn’t have dragons or spaceships. But it has a woman who made soup, and a man who kept her alive by writing everything down.”
The classroom went silent.
That evening, Mario sat by his window as the bakery below shut its doors. He held one last book—the one he had never whispered to. It was empty, bound in blue cloth, a gift Elena had given him a week before she died. She had written only on the first page: “Mario, now you write yours.”
For the first time in years, he opened a book to read it.
He picked up a pen.
And he began.
Antes de YouTube, los gamers dependían de las Player’s Guides de Nintendo Power. Estos libros de Mario son hoy piezas de colección muy cotizadas.
Joyas del coleccionismo:
Dato clave: Las guías japonesas de Shogakukan suelen tener más ilustraciones y lore que las versiones occidentales.
Si quieres empezar una colección seria, estos son los libros que valen dinero:
| Título | Año | Valor aprox. (US$) | Rareza | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Mario Teaches Typing (Manual + Disquete) | 1992 | $50 - $120 | Alta | | Nintendo Power #1 (con Mario en portada) | 1988 | $200+ | Extrema | | Super Mario-kun Vol. 1 (1ra edición japonesa) | 1990 | $80 - $150 | Media | | The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! Storybook | 1989 | $40 - $70 | Media |
Consejo: Revisa el estado de las páginas. Los libros de actividades (con stickers) son casi imposibles de encontrar completos.
No discussion of Mario books is complete without mentioning manga. While less known in the West, in Japan, Kodansha published the Super Mario-kun manga series by Yukio Sawada. This series is surreal, violent (in a Looney Tunes way), and hilarious. In these libros, Mario dies constantly, Luigi is a cowardly mess, and Yoshi drools constantly. A few of these have been translated into Spanish as "Mario Manga Manía."
For a more western approach, IDW Publishing (and before them, Archie Comics and Valiant) produced comic books that were later compiled into "libros de recopilación" (trade paperbacks). The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! comics, featuring live-action photo covers, are now collector's items.