Publishing is a profession in which very few achieve true excellence. If we look around the world and at the whole of the past century, there have been many good publishers (meaning: those who have published good books). Many able publishers as well (meaning: capable of publishing books of every kind). But few great publishers. Certainly many fewer than the great writers they themselves have published. Giulio Einaudi was one of those few great publishers.
How do we gauge the greatness of a publisher? The question doesn’t seem to have stirred many minds. There’s no point looking in the histories of publishing, which at best offer a certain amount of useful data and information on various aspects of that activity. But they don’t even try to give a judgment about quality, which ought to be as clear-cut and detailed as the judgment of a sonnet or an epic poem. It is best then to go back to the beginning, since a form is sometimes expressed to its fullest potential in its earliest moments. This happened, for example, in the history of photography. Anyone wanting to know what photography can be should begin by studying Nadar. But who was the Nadar of publishing? A Venetian publisher, Aldus Manutius. He was the first to see publishing as a form. A form in every respect: above all, of course, for the choice and sequence of published titles. Then for the texts that go with them (the opening pages that Aldus himself wrote are the noble ancestors not only of all modern introductions and afterwords but also of the cover flaps and editorial presentations, as well as publicity material). Then for the print form of the book and its qualities as an object. And here it is well known that Aldus was the unparalleled master: many agree that the most beautiful book ever printed is his Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (which appeared in 1499 as a rather difficult novel by an obscure living author: another sign of the publisher’s excellence is not just in publishing established classics but devoting just as much care to an unknown new writer). It will be said that the Hypnerotomachia was a unique creation, unrepeatable in every sense. But we also have to thank Aldus for the invention that was to have the most sensational fortune and is reproduced every day millions of times over. He invented the paperback: it was his Sophocles of 1502. For the first time a book appeared in a format and with a page layout that could easily be reproduced by a publisher of today, five hundred years later. I am fortunate enough to own a copy of that Sophocles and know that I could slip it into my jacket pocket at any time, go and sit in a café, and read his Philoctetes. One final observation: the form of a publishing house can also be seen in the way in which its various books go together (the texts as well as the volumes in their physical appearance), in the same way that chapter twenty-three and chapter eighty of a vast novel by Dumas go together or the third and the ninth distich of an elegy by Propertius.
Publishing as form, which is the supreme form of publishing, therefore began in Italy, in Venice, in the twenty years around the beginning of the sixteenth century. But brilliant discoveries can also be forgotten and buried. Aldus’s passage was like that of a meteor—and he certainly left little mark on the turbulent book trade over the next centuries. And so publishing generally became a very chancy business with not much profit (exactly as it is today), fascinating in every aspect but lacking in that formal excellence and rigor that Aldus first displayed.
Let us move straight on to Italy in the 1930s. Roberto Bazlen used to say that a country’s publishers are to be judged by browsing in its secondhand bookstalls. And he once taught us the difference, in a few memorable lines on Trieste immediately after the First World War, between modern publishing in the German language and Italian publishing: “You should have seen the libraries that ended up on bookstalls in the ghetto, straight after the war, when Austria was in ruins and the Germans were leaving or selling off the books of people killed during the war. A whole great unofficial culture, books that were truly important and completely unknown, lovingly sought and collected by people who read that book because they needed to have that very book. All stuff that passed through my hands, where I discovered stuff I had never expected to come across, but most of it, whose importance I hadn’t yet understood, slipped by me. Even now, if I hear of books that are totally unobtainable and have been reevaluated over these last twenty or thirty years, and which I’ll never find again, I remember how they passed through my hands, on the bookstalls of the ghetto, thirty or so years ago, covered in dust and ready to be sold off at a lira each, at two lire each. I’m talking about the libraries of Germans, of Austrian naval officers, etc., but if the situation had been the other way around and if it had been the Italians that had gone, the bookstalls would have collapsed under the weight of Carducci, Pascoli, D’Annunzio, and Sem Benelli, backed up by Zambini and other wretched folk.”
That Italy in which fascism, as we know, banned a certain amount of books but let many others pass through (and above all would have allowed them through if someone had wanted to publish them) was where Giulio Einaudi grew up, in a family belonging to the intellectual elite that Elena Croce so well described in Lo snobismo liberale. The young Einaudi wasn’t, and would never be, a reader. He didn’t have, and would never have, a deep understanding of any particular field. But through a natural gift, he could make good use of one of the peculiar characteristics of that strange elite into which he was born: to search out and recognize people “of worth” (as they used to say at that time). He also had an innate elegance, a sense of the invincible magic that aesthetic appearance can have (I cannot forget how Gianfranco Contini, the great critic and philologist, one day presented his collection Varianti at the Seeber bookshop in Florence and, leafing through the volume with delight, described it as “delicate to the touch”). So Giulio Einaudi started up a publishing house that very soon stood out above all the others as a creature with a different physiology. Not that Italy at the time was a publishing desert. The books that Benedetto Croce suggested to Laterza were of a high level, the early books of the Medusa series, published by Mondadori, were of excellent quality, La Nuova Italia’s Il Pensiero Storico collection offered essential works by eminent scholars including Mikhail Rostovtzeff, Walter F. Otto, Werner Jaeger, and Julius von Schlosser, some of which still await translation in other countries. But the overall sight of an Italian bookstall during that period must have been depressing, a picture of rare intellectual and physical drabness. The real Europe was elsewhere. And real Italian readers looked out, each month, for the latest publications by Gallimard rather than those of Italian publishers.
Giulio Einaudi probably began publishing as such without knowing it, driven by an exacting and radical sense of vocation. But in the years immediately after the Second World War his distinctive qualities must have already been very clear, even if he would certainly have described them in another way. It was then, in fact, that he must have been struck by the image of the publisher as Supreme Pedagogue or as a Sovereign who, in accordance with his enlightened designs, selects the matter that makes culture so that, little by little, it is octroyée, granted, to the people. It was certainly a splendid opportunity. After twenty years of fascism, everything seemingly had to be done or redone. The Christian Democrats, on the other hand, with their flaccid and obstinate shrewdness, had let it be known that all they wanted was the plain, mute, perpetual management of political and economic power. They could leave culture to be administered by the Left—after all, they were not cut out to deal with it, nor did it even attract them. They even abandoned cinema to its own devices, content to keep an eye on necklines. But they were in no doubt when television appeared—that was certainly for them.
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Giulio Einaudi understood all this better than anyone else. If it’s true that every publisher tends inevitably to be something of an autocrat and something of a Don Juan (which was Erich Linder’s definition, and he knew every publisher), it can be said that Italy in the immediate postwar years was like a hortus deliciarum. In the case of Giulio Einaudi, the autocrat regarded it as his natural task to educate and drill the whole population of the Left, identifiable above all in the numerous ranks of teachers, from primary school to university, who would contribute much to the fortunes of the publishing house, though padding out the catalog with too many of their own books. As for the Don Juans, there were hundreds of authors whom no one had previously approached or had known how to handle properly, all waiting to be seduced by him. And sometimes there were opportunities to acquire whole corps de ballet: the Polish historians, Russian semiologists … And so, after the death of Benedetto Croce and up to the end of the 1980s, Giulio Einaudi was the man with the most influence over Italian cultural life. In the ostentatious display of lay piety following his death, I don’t think anyone made this elementary observation. And so one day, as a legitimate reaction, someone spoke of Einaudi’s “dictatorship” and “hegemony.” Clumsy and inappropriate words. There was no sign of pistols drawn. And Italy, in any event, had plenty of eccentrics who wouldn’t have been intimidated by any kind of “hegemony.” I think it was more of a tacit domination and subtle hypnosis. The spontaneous zeal of Italian subjects was much greater than the libido dominandi to be found inside the publishing house. Oddly connected with all this was the strange phenomenon to be seen at commemorations: pious elegies to Giulio Einaudi were often counterbalanced by the list of his supposed defects: above all capriciousness, the ability to set collaborators against each other, a certain dandyism, insolence, inherent arrogance, a certain recklessness. Yet I think it was these very characteristics that enabled the publishing house to maintain its charm for so long. Those who worked with Giulio Einaudi were of every kind: some truly remarkable (and only rarely or sporadically listened to), others surly and above all tone deaf to quality. If some of them had been freely able to publish their favorite books, I think the overall result would have been fairly abysmal. And the form of the publishing house would certainly have suffered. But wasn’t it Giulio Einaudi himself who spoke of the publishing house as being a “collective” where “joint decisions” are made, as a “research laboratory,” as a workshop that constantly produces “work tools,” or even as a “public service”? Yes, but these were typically reassuring words for the profane—and it is well known that the solicitous educators of the masses never want to upset the ignorant too much (and perhaps they themselves end up believing the glib words they repeat at every conference or interview). Day-to-day publishing practice was fortunately very different: in the end, the only person capable of accurately divining what was, and what was not, “an Einaudi book” was Giulio Einaudi himself. This last, secret process through which a book had to pass before being published by Einaudi could certainly lead to enormous and repeated errors in judgment. But paradoxically this further helped in some way in giving the publishing house a more distinctive profile—an observation that is still relevant today, at a time when publishing houses, especially the larger ones, seem to be like formless stockpiles where you can find everything, with a particular emphasis on the worst.
My intention was to pay homage to a great publisher, who in his heyday had perhaps only one equal in the world: Peter Suhrkamp. And I don’t want to say here what I feel was missing in his catalog. I can only point out that what was missing was for me a vast part of the essential. But the question would be too long and complex. It would require a short book of its own. And this itself indicates how important Einaudi was, even for anyone who might find themselves radically opposed to him. In this respect, I would like to end with a brief story. Perhaps the moment of wildest (and altogether most disastrous) ambition for Einaudi was the encyclopedia venture. When the first volume appeared, I remember a friend of mine saying: “This is the last monument to Sovietism.” And I think he was right. Not because the texts published were at all Soviet in themselves (they were far from it, and went in quite different and sophisticated directions), but because the pretension, implicit in the work, was Soviet in offering the correct version of how we ought to be thinking (though obviously presenting itself in a way that was multidimensional, meta-disciplinary, variegated, problematic, transversal, as the fashion of the time required).
But now I come to my brief story: one of the editors of the Enciclopedia Einaudi invited me one day to write the entry for “body.” I told him I felt honored and perplexed, and instinctively asked him who was going to be writing the entry for “soul.” “There’s no plan for such an entry,” he immediately replied, as though I had asked something improper. At that moment I realized we would never have seen eye to eye.