A Dictionary of Symbols: Revised and Expanded Edition (New York Review Books Classics)

Juan Eduardo Cirlot (1916–1973) was born in Barcelona. In 1958, drawing on his vast erudition, which extended to medieval hermeneutics, Eastern art and religion, Sufism, and film, he produced the first edition of A Dictionary of Symbols, a book that he continued to revise and enlarge for the rest of his life. In the course of his life, Cirlot worked as a customs agent, for a bank, and in publishing. He was also known as an avid collector of medieval swords.

Valerie Miles has translated such writers as Enrique Vila-Matas and Rafael Chirbes, among many others. She is the editor of A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction and, with Azar Nafisi, co-editor of That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile. She lives in Barcelona, Spain, where she teaches translation and creative writing at the Pompeu Fabra University.

Jack Sage (1925–2018) enrolled at King’s College London in 1946, studying Spanish language and music and the theater of Golden Age Spain). In 1956, he was brought on as a lecturer in the Spanish department at King’s College, where he would work for the rest of his life. He retired in 1990 and spent the next two decades of his life consulting about the Spanish Golden Age for, among others, early-music ensembles, the BBC, and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Victoria Cirlot is a medieval scholar and professor of Romance Philology at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Her recent books include La visión abierta, Del mito del grial al surrealismo and Grial. Poética y mito.

Herbert Read (1893–1968) was an art historian, writer, and philosopher. A noted English anarchist, he coedited the British edition of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.