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Giulio Einaudi

Turin publisher (1912-1999), son of Luigi Einaudi, who in 1933 founded on via Arcivescovado the publishing house bearing his name and ran it for more than half a century.

Image from the Il Post article
From Il Post, 26 October 2012

Giulio Einaudi (1912-1999) was the publisher who, at the age of twenty-one, founded in Turin the publishing house that bears his name and ran it for more than half a century. The son of the economist Luigi Einaudi, a future President of the Republic, he gathered around himself schoolmates and anti-fascist intellectuals such as Cesare Pavese and Norberto Bobbio, turning his firm, with its democratic and secular outlook, into one of the centres of twentieth-century Italian culture.[1][2]

The family and the D'Azeglio lyceum

According to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani he was born in Turin on 2 January 1912, the third son of Luigi Einaudi and Ida Pellegrini, after his brothers Mario and Roberto; the Treccani Enciclopedia instead gives his birthplace as Dogliani, the town in the Langhe linked to the family.[1][2] In the 1920s he attended the Massimo d'Azeglio lyceum-gymnasium, where one of his teachers was Augusto Monti, an anti-fascist intellectual. Around Monti formed a sort of brotherhood of former pupils (Pavese, Leone Ginzburg, Bobbio and others) who met at the Caffè Rattazzi; Giulio's own university studies, between natural sciences and medicine, were by contrast irregular.[1]

Via Arcivescovado 7, 1933

On 15 November 1933 he founded Giulio Einaudi editore on the third floor of via Arcivescovado 7, in the same building that had housed the editorial office of Antonio Gramsci's Ordine nuovo.[1] Among the founding group, alongside Leone Ginzburg, Pavese, Bobbio and Massimo Mila, Giulio was the entrepreneurial soul of the project.[3] Ginzburg, who had just set up the publishing house with him, refused in 1934 to swear loyalty to the regime and was arrested; once free again in 1936, under special surveillance, he worked intensively at Einaudi alongside Pavese.[4]

The house's attention to foreign culture and to subjects at the margins of the regime's cultural policy cost the publisher arrest and internal exile (confino) in 1935.[2] During the Fascist years the firm's history was marked by a long series of arrests, imprisonments and sentences of confino for its collaborators, including Einaudi himself.[1] In 1938 he married Clelia Grignolio.[1]

War, Switzerland and the Resistance

Called up in 1940, he obtained a temporary discharge. After 8 September 1943 he chose exile in Switzerland, where he went on working as a publisher; back in Italy, he served with the Garibaldi brigades in Valle d'Aosta, and in 1944, in a liberated Rome, met Palmiro Togliatti.[1] His relationship with his editors also had a lighter side: in February 1942 he had offered Pavese six cigars as an advance for editing a volume of Carlo Bini, and Pavese replied with an equally mocking letter[5]:

"Having received the said 6 Roma cigars — for which I thank you — and having found them execrable, I am forced to tell you that I cannot honour a contract begun under such ill-omened circumstances."

Cesare Pavese, letter to Giulio Einaudi, 14 April 1942

The Wednesdays of via Biancamano

After the Liberation the publishing house settled at its historic premises at via Biancamano 1, with an entrance initially from corso Re Umberto 5.[1] There, from the late 1940s, the editorial board met every Wednesday, with Elio Vittorini, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg and others; a smaller committee on the accounts followed on Thursdays.[1] After Pavese's death in 1950, coordination of the publishing house passed to Luciano Foà.[3] In the same year, 1950, he married for the second time, Renata Aldovrandi.[1]

Under his leadership were launched the Coralli and Millenni series (1947), the Supercoralli (1948) and the Struzzi (1970), along with the Italian edition of Proust's Recherche, begun in 1946 after lengthy negotiations.[1] With Calvino and Carlo Levi the house renewed Italian fiction by promoting new authors; later came the great collective works, the Storia d'Italia (1972-82) and the Enciclopedia (1977-82).[2] There were also missteps: in 1947 the house rejected Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, and it was Natalia Ginzburg who broke the news to him; the contract for the new edition arrived on 11 July 1955 and the book was published by Einaudi in 1958.[6]

His way of viewing difficult times comes through in his editorial letters. On 26 July 1968, in the midst of the student protests, he wrote to the philologist Carlo Dionisotti[7]:

"The situation is so complex, and the fog so thick, that at times, to move forward, one risks running off the road: standing still, one does not break one's neck, but risks going backwards."

Giulio Einaudi, letter to Carlo Dionisotti, 1968

The crisis and the move to Mondadori

Rescue operations had already been needed between 1954 and 1957. In 1983 a serious financial imbalance emerged, and in 1984 the house was placed under a government-appointed receiver, the lawyer Giuseppe Rossotto, whose mandate was renewed in 1985; in 1989 it was acquired by Electa and in 1991 by the Elemond group, a joint venture between Electa and Mondadori.[1] The Treccani Enciclopedia dates the receivership to 1987 and the move to Mondadori to 1994.[2] In 1991 the offices also moved, from number 1 to number 2 via Biancamano, a relocation that was almost symbolic in its significance.[1] In the 1980s Einaudi had devised and personally overseen the series "Scrittori tradotti da scrittori" ("Writers translated by writers"); according to the publishing house, he was not a man of authoritarian decisions but a stimulator of debate and enthusiasm.[3] Today Einaudi is one of the main imprints of the Mondadori group.[8]

The final years

Kept away from operational leadership for some years, Einaudi returned as chairman in 1988, the same year in which he published his book of memories Frammenti di memoria; there followed Severino Cesari's Colloquio con Giulio Einaudi (1991) and honorary degrees from the universities of Trento (1997) and Turin (1998).[1] He died on 5 April 1999 at Poggio Sommavilla, in the province of Rieti, and is buried in the cemetery of Dogliani;[1] the Treccani Enciclopedia gives Magliano Sabina as his place of death.[2] For the publishing house, his passing coincided with the end of an era.[3]

Pages linking here

Related articles: Avigliana, Giulio Einaudi editore, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Settimo Torinese, Università degli Studi di Torino

Sources

  1. Treccani – Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani
  2. Treccani – Enciclopedia
  3. Giulio Einaudi editore
  4. ANPI
  5. Il Post — 6 April 2014
  6. Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi
  7. Il Post — 26 October 2012
  8. Il Post — 22 September 2015

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