The publishing industry and national history intertwine in “L’Italia dei libri. L’editore in dieci storie”, a beautiful volume by Tommaso Munari. Protagonists and publishing houses are described, through stories that have an essayistic tone, in ten chapters packed with notes…
Italy. From 1860 onwards. One of the most popular (and most screened) detective novels of the 20th century was released in the United States in 1939: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1888 – 1959). It arrived in our country immediately after the war, in a text quite different from the original: attenuated cynicism and alcohol gone for the protagonist, few drugs and vague sex for the interlocutors, reduced length, attenuation of “risky” situations and other moralistic devices. The sweetening of “mystery” books was a current practice in the publishing world, where obviously the enterprise of Arnoldo Mondadori was predominant, who had also invented the suggestive color for that genre of novels. It happened in 1929 and the prevailing fascist regime strengthened the need to translate the texts of Anglo-American authors with more or less censorious pruning and questionable stylistic transpositions or names and surnames of Italian authors through Anglo-American pseudonyms. The fact remains that the overall circulation of the series already in 1934 was close to two million copies and in 1941 it exceeded five; a suspension for the war followed, at the end of which it started again in a big way, on newsstands and by subscription, consolidating a precise expectation of many readers towards that literary “genre”. Only in 1952 did Chandler gain the right to more faithful translations, respectful of his genius and literary successes. To delve deeper into the history of the Italy of books, an entire chapter of the recent volume is entitled “crime for pleasure” (taking in the singular the title, itself derivative, of a historical-social essay on the detective novel by Ernest Mandel, published by us in 1990,), divided into four paragraphs: Lost in translation; Appointment at the newsstand; A detective as a friend; The color of crime.
Researcher and archivist
Tommaso Munari (1980) has been carrying out university research for about twenty years, first in Venice then in Turin, and archival and bibliographic work in various publishing houses. The other nine stories of the excellent essay, for Einaudi, Italy of Books. Publishing in Ten Stories (272 pages, 18.50 euros) concern: Emilio Treves (“at the service of the nation”) since 1878; Roberto and Enrico Bemporad (“Italian in the kitchen”, through Artusi) since the beginning of the new century; and then Ulrico Hoepli (“a textbook house”), Vito Laterza (“Southern questions”), Mondadori (the fifth chapter), Giulio Einaudi (“thinking in series”), publishing houses for students or teachers and Nicola Zanichelli (“a new anthology for a new school”), Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (“changing the world with books”), Luciano Foà with Roberto Calasso, Paolo Boringhieri and various others (“between complete works and unique books”), finally Elvira Sellerio (Sicilian inventory”), thus arriving at events and examples from all over Italy in the second half of the twentieth century.
The emancipation of two professions
Each chapter of Tommaso Munari’s volume is structured in paragraphs with catchy titles, which take their cue from the institutional context, from biographical events, from apt editorial contingencies, from literary masterpieces. The hundreds of rich and precise notes of the ten chapters are all collected at the end, in a much smaller body, over thirty pages, almost as many subsequently dedicated to a detailed and very useful index of names and titles, material for cross-referencing and further research. The history of publishing is the history of the emancipation of two professions (typographer and bookseller) first in another (the entrepreneur who has printing done to promote trade) and gradually in dozens of other professions that connect books to society, the publishing industry to national history.
Follow us on Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, Threads, YouTube, Facebook and X. Thank you
