well, let's just cut and paste -- shall we?
"How'd you come to know about Cervantes?" - Anony
The soundbite answer is: Bookplates.
Way back when, Mary bought a box of bookplates with a gesture drawing of Dom Quixote and the quote
"The man who fights for his ideals is the man who is alive" ~ Cervantes
printed on it. That quote struck Mary as being Truth. So she and the bookplates traveled through life together and that could have been the end of the Fab's knowing about Cervantes. But, fortunately, it wasn't because both Mary and the Fab would have missed out on one of the greatest writers and, perhaps, the greatest work of fiction ever written.
Oh, please. Learning doesn't happen that way. The segue wasn't bookplate to reading the novel. It was more like a twenty year process from bookplate, to song "The Impossible Dream" (from a musical kinda-sorta-based on the novel), to having someone accuse Mary of being "Quixotic" (funny how that phrase is never used as a compliment, but Mary took it that way), to an argument and a challenge on a message board wherein Mary (knowing that she was about to tilt at a windmill) titled the thread, "Throw me a lance and call me Quixote", which lead her to actually read the book because she had to use the book as a basis for the argument.
Oh, the Fab knows that it is all sorts of fun to just write whatever horrible things pop into your mind to people on message boards, but it is more of a challenge to use ideas, written images and quotes from a great work of fiction as your weapons. The Fab favors "Alice In Wonderland", but Mary, that time, chose Don Quixote and learned some amazing things in the process. Funny how everyone seems to win when learning, civility and chivalry are the rules for the discussion.
Everything after "bookplates" is the long answer Dear Anony, most of it anyway. Thanks for asking!