The Art of the Publisher
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An interior look at Roberto Calasso's work as a publisher and his reflections on the art of book publishing
In this fascinating memoir, the author and publisher Roberto Calasso meditates on the art of book publishing. Recalling the beginnings of Adelphi in the 1960s, he touches on the Italian house's defining qualities, including the considerations involved in designing the successful Biblioteca series and the strategy for publishing a wide range of authors of high literary quality, as well as the historic critical edition of the works of Nietzsche.
With his signature erudition and polemical flair, Calasso transcends Adelphi to look at the publishing industry as a whole, from the essential importance of graphics, jackets, and cover flaps to the consequences of universal digitization. And he outlines what he describes as the "most hazardous and ambitious" profile of what a publishing house can be: a book comprising many books, a form in which "all the books published by a certain publisher could be seen as links in a single chain"—a conception akin to that of other twentieth-century publishers, from Giulio Einaudi to Roger Straus, of whom the book offers brief portraits.
An essential book for writers, readers, and editors, The Art of the Publisher is a tribute to the elusive yet profoundly relevant art of making books.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Calasso (Ardor), novelist and publisher of Adelphi Edizioni, the highly regarded Italian press, has meticulously crafted 11 brief, elegant essays on book publishing. Calasso inquires about future book use in a long reflection based on his Adelphi experience. In an age when everyone wants to be a publisher and can be, after a fashion Calasso asks, why publish books for a living? Deep down, he contends, few involved in publishing today believe profit to be the prime motivation, given the industry's self-evident fragility. Calasso examines why publishers from the 16th century (Aldus Manutius, a Venetian printer credited with introducing italic type and the modern use of the comma)) to the 20th (Kurt Wolff, Kafka's publisher) have entered the industry. He worries about what drives content today. In his view, whether a book is cool or uncool and how the author look on television are not the right questions. Calasso asks whether the publisher is to become a "residual organ" in the book business, and emphatically answers no throughout his remarks, which are devoid of nostalgia or wishful thinking. While observing the expanding range of what is considered publishable, Calasso reveals his own publishing ideal, "faire plaisir" to give birth to literary pleasure and to light a beacon for discerning, if not wide, audiences. Several of these short takes and memoirs are must-reads for anyone interested in serious books, and the collection benefits from Richard Dixon's strikingly graceful translation.
