Call it the Italian paradox. No major publishing nation boasts more world-class publishers per capita, more enticing book design or lower list prices. A visitor from abroad who wanders into an Italian bookshop is tempted to fondle every book in sight, and observes that many of them bear familiar bylines. But where are the customers?
Taxi beyond Milan's city limits to Mondadori, Italy's leading book and magazine group ($1.35 billion in revenues), suitably headquartered in an Olympian building put up for it by Oscar Niemeyer. With luck you'll meet book division CEO Gian Arturo (or Gianni) Ferrari, who rose through the ranks to take charge not only of the Mondadori imprints but of subsidiary groups Einaudi, Sperling & Kupfer, Electa and Elemond. Perhaps it's Ferrari's unprecedented responsibilities that make him feel so strongly about the Italian paradox. On one hand, nearly half the adult population never touches a book, but then some 6% -- 7% of Italians buy half of all books sold: Italy is last on the list of book-buying nations in Europe. And now, for the first time, the country's five top book groups have joined forces in an Association for Books, which through festivals and heavy media promotion hopes to shake up the indifferent.
Mondadori's Universe
With affiliates (including a just-under-50% share of bestseller imprint Baldini & Castoldi), market leader Mondadori accounts for some 30% of the trade; thanks to recently acquired school publishers, its stake in the educational market rose to 18.5% -- and Gianni Ferrari's personal crusade to promote reading begins with better schoolbooks.
Group imprints turn out some 2250 new titles each year. These include the famous Oscar paperback lines and newer I Miti cheaper reprints. A new John Grisham will sell in the original edition for a year before becoming a $4.40 Miti; six months later it will be an Oscar at $7.75 or $8.50. The editorial director for fiction and nonfiction, Marco Vigevani, d s some 100 new titles per annum, a third of them fiction. Most novels here (and half the nonfiction) are translated. In addition to Grisham, Mondadori publishes Patricia Cornwell, Ken Follett, Scott Turow, Martin Cruz Smith and Thomas Harris. Italian publishers do try to hold on to authors, favoring multibook contracts; one expects the next Stephen King to come from Sperling, the next Tom Clancy from Rizzoli, and it was a news item when John le Carré moved from Mondadori to Feltrinelli.
It's a good market for the right author, Vigevani assures the visitor. Grisham, Follett and Cornwell do better with each successive title. And this is also the Italian home of upscale Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe and David Grossman, and in nonfiction Daniel Goldhagen, Martin Gilbert, Simon Schama, Berg's Lindbergh and Bill Gates. Marco Vigevani tells of a new strategy to reach more women readers, meaning more readers, period (with, for example, Niall Williams's As It Is in Heaven).
Renato Rodenghi, in charge of direct marketing, and of the house book club Club degli Editori, explains the new 50-50 joint venture with Bertelsmann's Euroclub. It's called Mondolibri, although for the time being each club retains its logo and catalogue; for the first three years Mondadori's Rodenghi will manage both clubs (with a combined roster of 1.5 million buyers).
Sperling & Kupfer used to be a partnership with Mondadori. Since the death of publisher Tiziano Barbieri, it is 100% group-owned, although it continues to operate in its own downtown offices, competing with Mondadori for the international bestsellers that are its specialty. Another familiar face, Carla Tanzi, is the publisher here. She is also the publisher and CEO of Sperling's literary imprint Frassinelli, one of whose current stars is Meyer Shalev. What's new at Frassinelli is an original Italian list, but when Tanzi d s an Italian book, it's likely to become international very quickly, and her current example and pride is thriller writer Marcello Fois, whom she sold to 12 countries (Harvill in the U.K., Heyne in Germany, Emecé in Spain).
Sperling d s some 200 titles yearly, 70% of them translations. Tanzi has done all of Stephen King, and other house regulars include Mary Higgins Clark, Barbara Taylor Bradford and Sidney Sheldon. A 20,000-copy sale is satisfactory, though Stephen King can rise to 150,000.
When Mondadori took over Einaudi, after the decline and fall of the prestigious Turin imprint, everybody expected a sea change. Of course, there was some cost-cutting following the collapse of founder Giulio Einaudi's impossible dream. But if staff was reduced (to the present 100 or so), title output remains steady (at 140 books per annum, plus 80 new paperbacks).
Nor was there any dumbing down; both subject matter and treatment continue to be college-level or better. "But we're not a university press," insists Roberto Gilodi, in charge of buying and selling rights. PW met with him and with Marisa Caramella, responsible for upscale books from English, which put her at the helm for Italian publication of Don DeLillo's Underworld. Her list also includes Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Anita Desai, Cormac McCarthy, Ruth Ozeki and Philip Roth -- none of them easy sells in Italy.
Einaudi remains a leader in multivolume reference sets, respected and pricey. Gilodi mentions an upcoming five-volume history of the novel by a team both international and interdisciplinary; a shorter version will be done by Princeton University Press. Similarly impressive histories of music and movies are in the works.
Despite its tie to Mondadori, Baldini & Castoli is a freestanding house -- actually a group, publishing under the flagship logo for bestselling and literary fiction and nonfiction, using the Zelig logo for satire, and La Tartaruga for women's books -- some 120 new releases a year. Publisher Alessandro Dalai displays a list that includes Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Jim Harrison and Norman Mailer. Their bestselling American last year was Nelson DeMille.
PW also spoke with La Tartaruga's founder, Laura Lepetit, who thinks she has accomplished most of what she hoped to do in her pioneer years, when she was the only Italian publisher for writers beginning with Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, and going on to Grace Paley and Barbara Pym.
Rizzoli and Friends
RCS -- the acronym joins Rizzoli's book/press empire to the national daily Corriere della Sera -- claims market leadership in Italian print publishing. In books alone, the group is number two, with some 17% of the country's trade book sales. Rosaria Carpinelli, publisher of the Rizzoli imprint and of the BUR ("universal library") paperback series, reports good news from this group, which has been through some bad times. Market share has been increasing steadily from year to year -- even from month to month.
Flagship imprint Rizzoli releases 120 to 130 new titles each year, fiction and nonfiction, both original and translated. Its forte is Italian novels by familiar signatures such as Dacia Maraini, Alessandro Baricco and Andrea Camilleri. Six books in 10 are translations, mostly from English, and Rizzoli is the regular imprint of Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum and Kathy Reichs, of July Blume, John Irving and Thomas Pynchon as well.
Carpinelli g s for quality thrillers and women's fiction -- because her readers do. She is an active player at all the fairs, including BEA and London, even Jerusalem (as a former editorial fellow). But there is another side to Rizzoli: a strong nonfiction side, stressing Italian social and political issues, written by the cream of press and media journalists. Foreign entries include Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh and Dava Sobel's Longitude -- which did 40,000 copies here.
As part of a revamping of Rizzoli's trade group, Mario Andreose is back at the helm at Bompiani (and, as always, edits the books of his friend Umberto Eco). He runs his imprints independently; only production and back-office functions are shared. "It's like Knopf at Random House," he explains. New trade releases come to 120 titles annually, 60% fiction, mostly from abroad. It's the house of Vladimir Nabokov, Jay McInerney, Erica Jong, Patricia Highsmith, Hunter Thompson, James Ellroy and Joseph Heller, and of the recent Pulitzer winner, Hours by Michael Cunningham.
Adelphi, in which Rizzoli is a minority (48%) partner is run by world-class author Roberto Calasso. It is certainly the country's leading upmarket imprint, one that can dare begin a spring-summer list with Jorge Luis Borges and Elias Canetti (even if they are followed by Georges Simenon, Jamaica Kincaid and the brothers Grimm). In a series called Fabula, Adelphi d s contemporary writers of quality -- Milan Kundera, Muriel Spark and Frank McCourt, and their Italian counterparts such as Anna Maria Ortese and Giuseppe Ferrandino. A Biblioteca Scientifica imprint shelters Richard P. Feynman, Douglas Hofstadter and Marvin Minsky.
Although Adelphi's catalogue resembles that of a university press, put together by a committee of academics and literary critics, Calasso d s most of the choosing. The beauty of it is that the books sell. Three Adelphi titles were among the top six the week PW visited. Two were by Sándor Márai, a virtually unknown Hungarian writer self-exiled by Communism, a suicide in the U.S. at the age of 89. Thanks to some breathless reviews and great word-of-mouth, Márai's Embers sold 180,000 copies for Adelphi (which licensed translations to Knopf, Piper Verlag, Denmark's Gyldendal, Spain's Emecé and more). A second Márai novel had already reached 100,000 copies during PW's tour, topping the bestseller list.
The Longanesi Constellation
The Longanesi group, fondly known as the "seven sisters," together with trade-reference giant Garzanti and social science leader Laterza, are joined by a sturdy thread. It's the Mauri family's Messaggerie Italiane, the country's leading independent distributor and a growing bookshop and superstore chain, which holds a majority stake in Longanesi and some of its sister companies.
First, we stop at Longanesi, where co-managing director Stefano Mauri has recently become CEO, replacing the late Mario Spagnol, who had been responsible for the extraordinary growth of Longanesi in recent years. Mauri describes "seven sisters" who have now become eight, thanks to SuperPocket, an impressive mass market venture launched jointly with rival group Rizzoli to counter Mondadori's I Miti line. Flagship imprint Longanesi makes its money with blockbusters such as Britain's indefatigable Wilbur Smith and America's James Redfield, but it is also known for the books Spagnol and his tasteful and marketwise editors and scouts brought in, like Sophie's World, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting.
Not all these books carry the Longanesi logo. As appropriate, a book might go to Guanda Editore (established 65 years ago in Parma), a house for quality fiction, almost all translated, or to Salani (one of the country's oldest imprints, founded in Florence in 1862), now one of Italy's most admired children's lists. Corbaccio has made its mark with New Age, branching out into "extreme" adventures, women's nonfiction, serious but non-conformist history. It all adds up to some 250 new titles a year, not including paperbacks and reprints.
Luigi Brioschi, newly appointed editorial director of Longanesi, who upholds the literary side of the group at Guanda, speaks of the "second Latin American boom," from which the group has largely profited. The star here is unquestionably Luis Sepúlveda, with 2.5 million copies sold in six years. And then the "English-Scottish revival" with the likes of Trainspotting. And let's not forget the "new Indian novel," via Roy. Brioschi d sn't find such books in New York any more (somehow "sales" and "quality" no longer go together there, says he).
Salani and Ponte alle Grazie are managed by Luigi Spagnol, Mario's son. It's the Italian imprint for Roald Dahl and Astrid Lindgren, done the thrifty Italian way (pocket format and pocket-priced, with b&w illustrations).
Garzanti has gone through more of a change than any other major group since PW last visited Italy, a function of the conversion of a family empire into a modern business. While the Merlini family's UTET and the Mauris' Messaggerie carry on their 50-50 partnership, the group has now been reorganized, with separate companies handling trade publishing (Garzanti Libri, now majority owned by Messaggerie), major reference works (Garzanti Grandi Opere, with a UTET majority) and services common to the two (Garzanti Editore, still 50-50).
Gianandrea Piccioli has seen to the transformation of trade house Garzanti Libri, responsible not only for fiction and general nonfiction and the classics line but for the ubiquitous Garzantine, the popular and authoritative single-volume softcover encyclopedias.
He feels that he and his staff have reached optimal cruising speed. By year-end, they will have published 167 new titles (up from last year's 108), with what can only be called a skeleton force of five. Little has changed in editorial policy, except perhaps a greater stress on commercial fiction. Garzanti has long been the Italian imprint for Michael Crichton. "But we are also Italy's market leader in p try," says Piccioli, "and we publish all the work of George Steiner, and a catalogue of 600 classics, beginning with ancient Greece."
In current books, the breakdown is fiction/nonfiction in equal proportions. If half the novel list is translated, Italian originals account for two-thirds of the nonfiction. Among familiar bylines Garzanti d s the books of Michael Ondaatje, Chaim Potok, Brad Meltzer's The Tenth Justice, to be followed by the same author's Dead Even, and the Scott Adams Dilbert series.
The Roman Scene
In Rome, where recognizable imprints can be counted on the fingers of one hand (leaving fingers to spare), Editori Laterza has managed to be one of the country's most respected international imprints in the social and human sciences. Publisher Giuseppe Laterza is based in the capital, spending only a few days each fortnight in the company's birthplace, Bari, way down south.
In this house known for its schoolbooks and university-level monographs, general nonfiction represents only 35% of activity, but it has kept Laterza up front in the best bookstores. About half of the 150 new titles per annum are general books, and 40 of those are likely to be found in any first-class bookstore, brightly designed for the trade.
Laterza mentions another way he has found to liven up the list: he publishes one book each month that d sn't seem to belong in a Laterza catalogue at all, like an anecdotal exposé denouncing the low standards of hospital care, commissioned from a young doctor who published it under a pseudonym. The book created scandal, threats, a defense of the author in parliament; and starting with a 10,000-copy printing, it racked up 55,000 sales. Another book that didn't belong offered tips on eating well (and safely) after 50. Laterza also commissioned English historian Eric Hobsbawm to describe what he expects from the 21st century.
If Laterza imports and translates 15 to 20 titles each year, it's one of the rare Italian houses that sells more than it buys. A five-volume History of Women, which included input from leading American authorities, was co-published by Harvard University Press and major imprints in Germany, Japan, Spain, France, the Netherlands and more (with some 400,000 books sold to date). Blackwell was co-publisher of an acclaimed Making of Europe project, with some notable foreign authors.
Free Standing, Successfully
Its 5% slice of the trade market places Feltrinelli among the greats, yet it remains a family affair, with Inge Feltrinelli as president, son Carlo as CEO. This eminently literary house survived some rough years after the disappearance of its ebullient founder; it manages to find and develop Italian authors even in periods when they are thin on the ground, and they capture most of the prestigious literary prizes (even if few of these prizes lead to significantly increased sales).
It helps that the Feltrinelli name appears on the country's most attractive bookshops, strategically sited on the best streets of the biggest towns, and in an increasing number of smaller ones. Yet Carlo Feltrinelli tells PW about the recent decision to separate the publishing house and retail chain into separate companies, as a way to allow the latter to develop its own strategies, involving music and media as well as books. He also unveils the upcoming launch of Internet bookselling (as a 50-50 venture with the publishers of daily La Repubblica and weekly Espresso), competing with the existing Messaggerie Italiane's Internet Bookshop (a partnership with the W.H. Smith company in the U.K.).
On the publishing side, now the responsibility of new editor-in-chief Massimo Turchetta (ex-Mondadori), Feltrinelli d s some 80 titles a year, plus 120 paperbacks (mostly reprints from the list). Fiction and nonfiction get equal rights here, and six books in 10 are translations. This is the Italian imprint of Richard Ford, Will Self, Seamus Deane and John le Carré. Yet English d sn't dominate a list on which Isabel Allende appears, and they have done wonders with France's Daniel Pennac.
In its origins a Catholic publisher that made clever use of its profits and know-how to enter the mainstream, Edizioni Piemme, in small-town Casale Monferrato (an hour out of Milan) seems to grow even as you watch it. Since PW's last visit, CEO Pietro Marietti has acquired a Milan editorial base and has also had the good sense to take on a streetwise Milan publisher, MariaGiulia Castagnone, to edit adult books in this house that made its mark with children's literature (in the care of Alessandra Gnecchi, ex-Salani).
Pliemme is hardly a small publisher, what with 250 new titles each year; adult and children's books each account for about 40% in turnover, the balance earned in religious books. The adult list was launched at the beginning of last year with the recruiting of Castagnone; since she is a former translator and publisher of translations, most of the books come from abroad. She looks for young talent, but admits not turning away from purely commercial writing. "The main thing is quality," she says, "and then Pietro knows how to market it." And, indeed, Marietti is now considered one of the best, thanks to uninhibited use of TV, press and pamphlet campaigns; his house is now number six among general publishers in Italy.
Last time around, PW profiled Il Saggiatore, a revival of the prestigious nonfiction imprint founded in 1958 by a family maverick, the late Alberto Mondadori, publisher of Sartre and Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Karl Popper, Marshall McLuhan. The reviver was another family member estranged from the family empire, Arnoldo Mondadori's grandson Luca Formenton. Since that last visit, Formenton has formed a group of his own, putting upscale Il Saggiatore together with Marco Tropea Editore and Practiche.
Formenton compares the approach of his little group to that of Longanesi, with separate editorial teams for each line, shared sales and rights departments. Marco Tropea -- an admired editor both at Mondadori and Longanesi -- functions as group editorial director, with Formenton's brother Mattia as general manager. They turn out some 150 new books each year, including paperbacks -- mostly reprints from the catalogues of the three houses. That allows them to dip into the social science and political classics that gave Il Saggiatore a name, and to sample Tropea's choice of contemporaries ranging from Donald Westlake, Douglas Coupland, Sebastian Faulks and Joyce Carol Oates to the younger Latin Americans. In all, eight books in 10 here are translations, although Italian input is increasing, particularly in nonfiction. Among recent Saggiatore acquisitions: Questioning the Millennium by Stephen Jay Gould and Two Cities by John Edgar Wideman. At Marco Tropea: The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells, While I Was Gone by Sue Miller and the complete works of Walter Mosley and Jerome Charyn.
As for Practiche, founded in Parma in 1976, it earned its right to stand alongside Il Saggiatore with its catalogue of literary and philosophical works. More recently, it has moved into women's studies, practical books and a line of religious essays that includes the complete works of the Dalai Lama. Among recent buys: Gail Sheehy's Understanding Men's Passages, and Reversing Asthma by Robert Firshein.
The Bottom Line
One of the lessons you learn from the optimism of a Luca Formenton is that even small can be beautiful in Italy -- if you have a Mondadori to distribute for you. "Otherwise small publishers get killed by distribution," he says. Obviously, the publishers on PW's tour had got it right. You also learn that a smaller publisher can still compete at the top of the bestseller list. Luigi Bernabò, who with his spouse, Daniela, runs one of Milan's world-class literary agencies, offers the example of Adelphi, which picked up Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes for a song. (That house did predictably well with it, so the next McCourt cost them -- but by then they could afford it.)
With a list of top-flight representations, the Bernabòs report a steady demand for their foreign authors. If there has been a change, it's in the ever-higher prices paid for list toppers, with a corresponding cooling off in bidding for the rest of the list. Luigi Bernabò remains an optimist. He points to the market for children's books, which has suddenly taken off. And he also mentions veteran editor Sandra Alessandro, who is entering the market with a new imprint called Le Vespe, armed with investment money to compete in upmarket fiction.
Agent Susanna Zevi is another optimist, despite the fact that her American principals mostly deal in caviar -- Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Arcade, Harcourt Brace, Overlook Press, Harvard University Press, MIT, the New Press and more like them. The other problem is that most of the bidding comes from five groups, when a healthy market would call for at least 20. Yet her business gets better from year to year, for groups beget imprints, and often that leads them to enter new areas -- spirituality or Eastern religions -- areas that in the past would only be of interest to smaller houses.
Let the last word come from the south, not exactly hospitable to books. In Naples, Mario Guida, who presides over a family group that includes both a publishing arm and a bookstore chain, would like to demonstrate that both can prosper in his land and culture if one applies the right ideas, and some energy. Founded in 1920 by Guida's father, the retail group now includes eight wholly-owned shops and one franchise. Publishing here is a modest venture.
But in 1995 Guida built its own Web site, developing it in no time into a full-service e-business selling everything in print in Italy and in Italian -- some 350,000 titles. Now Mario Guida is convinced that the Internet will be the way for the south to overcome its built-in handicaps -- reaching out to Italians who don't even get to Naples, as well as to the rest of the world.
It's worth trying.
