Since 22 April La nave di Teseo, the publishing house directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi, has been distributing in ebook format an essay by the well-known French writer Michel Houellebecq entitled HP Lovecraft. Against the world, against life. It is not really new, in fact it is the first book that Houellebecq has ever published: in France it came out in 1991, in Italy it was published ten years later by Bompiani, but it had been out of print for some time as can happen to books considered “minor” even by authors who sell a lot of copies. The unusual thing is that on May 8th this same book will be published in paper edition by another publisher, Wudz Edizioni, and in another translation.
Wudz Edizioni is a new publishing house that has published its first three books – I dream to live by Steven Spielberg, How to build a human being by Hiroshi Ishiguro e Stay alive by Valentina Barile, all three non-fiction – at the beginning of March. It was founded by Marco Gallorini and Andrea Marmorini, former partners and directors of the Woodworm record label, which is based in Arezzo and produces the records of Malika Ayane and La Representative di Lista, among others. The editorial director is Damiano Scaramella, who previously worked for Il Saggiatore and is also the author of a novel.
The ship of Theseus, on the other hand, is the main Italian publisher of Houellebecq. The French writer is one of the authors who, when Sgarbi left the editorial direction of Bompiani to found La nave in 2015, decided to move to the new publishing house. Since then his novels have been published Serotonin And Annihilatethe wise In the presence of Schopenhauer And Cahierand the autobiographical book A few months of my life. Furthermore, since 2019 La nave has also published new editions of most of Houellebecq’s old novels, including Elementary particles (1998), generally considered his masterpiece; Alone Submission (2015) is still available in a Bompiani edition.
The almost simultaneous publication of HP Lovecraft. Against the world, against life by two different publishers in the two possible formats is due to how the rights for the publication in Italian of the book were granted with the consent of Houellebecq himself and his agent François Samuelson. And it is linked to the fact that in France the rights for the paper and digital publication of this book are divided: the former are controlled by one publisher, Éditions du Rocher, the latter by another, namely Flammarion. Éditions du Rocher is the small publisher that published HP Lovecraft in 1991. Flammarion, on the other hand, is the large publishing house and has published all of Houellebecq’s most important books since 1998; it is part of Madrigall, the third largest French publishing group, which also owns Gallimard.
For Italy, the rights for the paper publication of HP Lovecraft. Against the world, against life they belonged to Bompiani. Wudz did not yet exist in bookstores at the time, but the people working there were already planning its first publications and contacted Éditions du Rocher to inquire whether a new edition could be published.
Bompiani had told Éditions du Rocher that she was not interested in renewing the contract for the rights, so Wudz asked Elidia, the company that owns Éditions du Rocher, to be able to acquire them. Sometimes the publishing rights of books by foreign authors are managed directly by the authors themselves, with or without literary agents acting as intermediaries, in other cases it is the publishing houses that publish those books in the original edition that negotiate for the translations: it depends on how the publishing contracts and their renewals are made, which sometimes concern a single book or more than one. However, Elidia allowed Wudz to publish HP Lovecraft agree with Houellebecq and Samuelson.
The negotiations took place between 2022 and 2023 and lasted a few weeks, says Scaramella: «At the time we didn’t even have covers to show, but only our motivations: for us it was important to bring back to Italy a book that was only found in flea markets and on eBay.”
The contract between Wudz and Elidia only concerns paper publications because when the first edition of HP Lovecraft ebooks didn’t exist, and so did the rights for digital editions. By subsequent agreements Houellebecq granted them to Flammarion, publisher of most of his books.
Scaramella explains that Wudz was initially not interested in the rights for ebook publication because it had the priority of re-proposing the book in paper edition – until now it has only released its books in this format.
For its part, La nave di Teseo has agreed with Flammarion to publish the book in ebook version in February. In that month, publishing professionals had been informed of the release of the Wudz edition, announced to bookshops to organize reservations. In response to an article by Everyday occurrence who was the first to tell the whole story, La nave underlined that publication in two formats by different publishers is «legitimate and usual also in other countries». It is slangly indicated by the English term split“splitting”.
The cover of HP Lovecraft’s ebook. Against the world, against life distributed by the Ship of Theseus. The face on the cover is that of Houellebecq
Beyond the format, the two new Italian editions of HP Lovecraft. Against the world, against life they also stand out for their translation: that of Wudz was done by Scaramella, while that of the Ship of Theseus is the first Italian translation of the essay, which was written by the writer and literary agent Sergio Claudio Perroni (1956-2019), one of the founders of the Ship of Theseus. The ebook has a preface by Marco Missiroli, while both editions have an afterword by Stephen King. The prices are also different, understandably: the paperback will be on sale for 16 euros, the digital version costs 4.99.
The book, which is 160 pages long in the paper version, is a kind of “poetic manifesto of literature weird which starts from the biography of HP Lovecraft”, explains Scaramella. That is, it is a reflection on the imagination of the American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft, considered with Edgar Allan Poe one of the first authors of horror novels as well as a precursor of science fiction, but it also analyzes his racism and how it influenced his fiction in which monstrous creatures appear .
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