Libri buoni e a buon prezzo. Le edizioni Salani (1862–1986) (review)

The house established in Florence by Adriano Salani (1834–1904) is among the most interesting in the history of Italian publishing. Its founder was the son of a green grocer, who had no desire to sell cabbages and so apprenticed himself at an early age to a printer. Having learnt the trade he chanced his hand, setting up a modest printing shop with a second-hand wooden hand-press and a few cases of old type, in the poor quarter of San Niccolò, nowadays at the foot of Piazzale Michel-angelo. The year was 1862 and he embarked on a programme of publishing ballads, sensational news items, and other ephemera, an output that remained staple fare up to and beyond the end of the nineteenth century. Salani’s genius consisted in finding a public just above the threshold of literacy and feeding them a diet of short, easily digested texts, including song-books and joke-books of his own compilation. The monies came rolling in and Salani moved to a new, state-of-the-art, printing establishment in 1888 on the edge of town in Viale Militare, now Viale dei Mille. He expanded his success by investing in the popular novel and discovering a new female readership, where his key author was Carolina Invernizio (1851–1916), an Italian version of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. He published her first novel, Rina, o l’angelo delle Alpi in 1877 (not listed here; the earliest entry is instead for 1884) and, when she married, found her a house in front of the printing shop, so that the flood of manuscript leaves only had to cross the street to be set in type. Production boomed, the years went by, and the running of the house passed gradually to his son, Ettore Salani (1869–1937), who nevertheless continued on the lines established by Adriano. One rather daring choice was Colette and the quartet of Claudine novels in 1906. He also introduced Matilde Serao, another bodice-ripper, in 1912, and Elinor Glyn (her of the ‘tiger skin’ and wildly erotic by the standards of the time) in 1915; but the real money-spinner proved to be Delly (the at the time well-concealed pseudonym for Jeanne-Marie and Frédéric Petitjean de la Rosière), first introduced in 1923, whose contents—in the words of a contemporary journalist—were eagerly devoured by the ‘international bourgeoisie of young ladies’. A third generation, Mario Salani (1894–1964), a fervent Catholic like his father, allowed the ecclesiastical authorities too much freedom in purging the catalogue (on the basis of the Index librorum prohibitorum, still published up to 1948 and only formally rescinded in 1966). Though his attempts to redirect the firm into the field of religious publishing had some successes, most ventures lost money and Fascism and the Second World War did the rest. The firm never really recovered: in 1958 it sold off the printing establishment and in 1962, exactly a hundred years after its foundation, the family gave up its interest and it was transformed into a public company. One curiosity is that a controlling share was bought by Gina Lollobrigida and her husband of the time. The cruellest blow was yet to come, with the Florence flood of 1966, which annihilated the stock in the warehouse. The company was officially dissolved in 1981 and taken over by Longanesi under the control of Mario Spagnol, while from 2005 it has been part of the Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol (GeMS). The brand name was kept alive, however, in the field of children’s literature: quite appropriately, Salani is the Italian publisher of Harry Potter and thus in recent years has reacquired some of its former glory.

The portrait given here summarizes the lengthy historical introduction by Ada Gigli Marchetti (pp. 11–92), professor of contemporary history at the University of Milan, which...