I realize that this might not be the most appropriate subreddit to ask this; if so, please redirect me and I'll repost elsewhere.
I'm working on a project which brings me into contact with a number of old and rarely-used books in a university library. I found one in Spanish, published in Madrid in 1941 by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, entitled "Escritos Filosoficos". It's inscribed (in Spanish) in a cramped handwriting.
It seems to say (translated) "To Juan Pujol. In memory of Ramiro. With a cordial greeting, (illegible)"
A basic google/wikipedia search showed that a Juan Pujol Garcia was a double agent of some note from WWII. He also had involvements in the Spanish Civil War, as did the author of the book.
I can't make out the name of the person who inscribed the book.
The person to whom this book was inscribed has at least a partial name match to Juan Pujol Garcia, who was revealed in the 1980s as Garbo, a highly-successful double agent during WWII.
Garcia was from Spain, was caught up in the Spanish Civil War as was Ramos, who was killed by Republican forces. Did they know each other?
Would "Juan Pujol" have been a common enough name that this book could have belonged to a different Juan Pujol than the one who became Garbo?
Can the name of the inscriber be deciphered, and does it add anything to this item's significance?
Is this item something of enough significance to submit to the library archivists? Typically their policy is "if the book is 200 years old or more, or if it has some historical significance or rarity" for automatic inclusion in the archives.
So, I've been staring at those scans for quite a while now, trying to make out the signer's name, and I'm stumped. At first I thought the surname might be Ledesma, which would have been interesting given that Ramos' middle name, but at a second glance it appears that's probably just wishful thinking.
By a very quick and completely unscientific search of Facebook, it would appear that Juan Pujol is not a particularly uncommon Spanish name. 'Juan' is, as you'd expect, incredibly common; Pujol also appears to be relatively so.
I did a few Google searches, and a text search of Stephan Talty's Pujol biography Agent Garbo and Christopher Andrew's Defence of the Realm (which has a pretty extensive account of the GARBO operation) and couldn't find anything to connect Ramos and Pujol. As far as I can establish, Pujol was living in Catalonia until well into the civil war, when he crossed the lines to join the nationalists and eventually ended up in Madrid. Ramos was assassinated in Madrid in the early months of the civil war in late 1936, so I can't place them living in the same city at the same time.
It's perfectly possible that they met, and it's certainly possible that Pujol, who came from a conservative middle class Catholic background but whose political views evolved and changed (essentially covering the entire left-right spectrum at various times), read Ramos' work. I just can't seem to find anything conclusive either way. Talty does refer, however, to Pujol refusing to join the Falange after his discharge from the nationalist army, so it doesn't appear that he was a fellow traveller with Ramos.
This was a relatively cursory search, of course, so perfectly possible I missed something. I don't have a copy of Operation Garbo, the memoir Pujol wrote with Nigel West, to hand; that's the only other avenue I could suggest investigating further. But there don't appear to be any obvious links, or any definitive (or even especially compelling) evidence to suggest that the book belonged to GARBO, or that the two had any interactions. I think you'd probably have a hard time convincing an archivist that this volume was particularly significant.
All of which is unfortunate, because I got super-excited when I first read your question. GARBO is a really, really interesting bit of intelligence history, and he's a very interesting (if complicated) character.
If it helps anyone who can actually answer this, the first name of the signer looks like an abbreviation of Guillermo or Guillaume to me.
The signer´s last name looks like Padierna to me, first name is composed, the M in a man´s composed name usually stands for María, Manuel or Miguel. I can´t make out the first part of the name.
Pujol is a very common family name in Catalonia.