Manuel Sanchis Guarner's book La Ciutat de València. Síntesi d'història i geografia urbana (1972) not only treasures a rich knowledge and a deep appreciation of the city. The typewritten original holds another secret that we now reveal for the first time: more than one hundred and fifty unpublished drawings of monuments, statues, buildings, paintings, engravings and representations related to the city.
Sanchis Guarner, with a delicate and precise work of composition, made from the typewritten original an authentic model of what would become the printed edition promoted by the Círculo de Bellas Artes de València in 1972. On practically every page, the author invested time and dedication to sketch on paper, in a quick but precise style, an interpretation of what would later become the entire graphic rigging that would accompany the text.
After fifty years, we present those unknown drawings that show Sanchis's skill in selecting the details and lines of the images that would later make up the illustrations in the book. None of the drawings, however, were part of the final edition. That laborious work and at the same time associated with the professor's most intimate vocation, drawing, shows us another side of the linguist and philologist Manuel Sanchis Guarner, and they see the light for the first time in an exhibition where some of the drawings are compared with the originals.
