Bestsellers, i.e. best-selling books, are in some way the most faithful mirror of the tastes and preferences of an era and a people. And yesterday much more than today, since once upon a time, up until a few decades ago, reading was the only cultural event which the masses, and not some culturally enlightened elite, could access, unlike what happens in our times, in which the audiovisual media in their variety and multiplicity play an even more significant quantitative role.
Precisely the brutal competition of the latter who compete for reading for people's free time has meant that the search for the bestseller has now become the obsession of the entire book industry and its players. A bestseller can reward an editor or writer in the same way a movie star, music star, or sports star does.
Happy bestselling everyone! And above all, history teaches.
The bestsellers, the mirror of a country
The history of a country is not made up only of important political events, of wars, of peace, of treaties, of governments and so on, that is, the events of which the history books speak. It is also made up of small daily events that fill the life of the population: what we eat, how we dress, what the working conditions are, how we spend our free time, what the houses we live in and the schools are like. , hospitals and so on. Among these "small events" a privileged role is played by the readings that people carry out, that is, the books that ordinary people read, because they show the social and cultural level of the population. Not the great titles that have rightfully entered literary histories, not the writers who are studied in school, not the poets who have won the Nobel Prize, but the books that normal readers buy and which appear in the booksellers' windows.
Talking about bestsellers therefore means approaching the history of a country from a certainly unusual and unusual point of view, but certainly a harbinger of useful indications for the profound knowledge of a people. And therefore it is from his analysis that illuminating indications can be drawn on the average cultural level of a particular country.
Let us therefore retrace, albeit within the limits of space that we are allowed, the history of Italy from the point of view of bestsellers, from its birth in 1861 to today, to identify some aspect that perhaps history with a capital "S", that of the great events that are studied in school, does not allow us to grasp. And we will see at the end of this quick excursus if it will also be possible to obtain some indications for the future of the book.
The size of the publishing market
An indispensable premise of any analysis of books, and even more so of bestsellers, is knowledge, albeit summary, of the data relating, directly or indirectly, to the book market. Without them any discourse on matter ends up remaining abstract, incomplete, devoid of any valid argument.
We can therefore say that the day after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, in 1861, the population of the country numbered 26.300.000 inhabitants within its current borders. The percentage of illiterates, counted precisely in a census in 1861, was very high: 78% of the population could neither read nor write. The comparison with the European countries with which we usually compare ourselves is merciless. In Germany illiteracy was zero, defeated by a long tradition of mass schooling. In France, England and Holland it ranged from 20 to 30% of the population, a percentage that our country would reach only 60-70 years later.
The actual reality was also certainly worse than that highlighted by the official statistics for at least two reasons. The first because many of the so-called official "alphabets" actually only knew how to draw their own signature, but they were far from an effective possession of the language. The second because the official figure of illiteracy, that 78%, was the average of an extremely diversified geographical reality between the North and the South of the country. If in Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria the illiteracy rate slightly exceeded 50%, in Sardinia it rose to 90% of the population, in Sicily to 89%, in Calabria, Basilicata, Campania, Puglia and Abruzzo it was around 86%. %.
Furthermore, this gap would grow rather than shrink over the decades, so much so that the 1911 census recorded an average national illiteracy rate of just under 40% of the population. But it was the result of 11% in Piedmont, 13% in Lombardy, 17% in Liguria, compared to 70% in Calabria, 65% in Basilicata, 60% in Puglia, 58% of Sardinia, Sicily and Abruzzo. Differences that also remained in the following decades, when in the 1981 census, faced with a national illiteracy rate of 3%, there was a North attested to 1% of the illiterate population compared to 6% in the South of the country.
A poor book market…
The publishing market was therefore placed on an extremely scarce, one might say almost narrow, base of potential users, reduced as it was by the abnormal percentage of illiterates. Furthermore, the economic conditions of the country were such that the purchase of a book was part of the so-called luxury consumption, and this still greatly reduced the possibility of approaching books and reading. Scarce readers, therefore, in the face of a publishing industry which nonetheless lacked neither proposals nor offers. Indeed, these were conspicuous, such as not to look bad in comparison with other European countries, or at least not to the extent highlighted by the illiteracy rate: in a nutshell, therefore, few readers, compared to many published books.
This is how the book market presented itself in the aftermath of the birth of the Kingdom of Italy, and it remained so in the following decades, practically until today, keeping this basic characteristic unchanged, always marked by a chronic scarcity of readers, which continues to burden heavily on our publishing and to represent the most obvious worry. Significant, if anything, the fact that the supply of books was once only slightly lower than today, in relation to the number of alphabets. If in the decade 1861-1871 an average of 3183 books were published each year, compared to about 6.000.000 alphabets (22% of the population of over 26.000.000 inhabitants), and therefore one book for every 1900 alphabets, in 2013, with about 58.000.000 official alphabets, more than 60.000 works came out, which however, excluding reprints and brochures, not counted in the official surveys until 1967, are reduced to around 40.000 works, one for every 1450 alphabets.
… but full of book offers
On this audience of (scarce) readers, the publishers of the time carried out their work with considerable difficulty, but also with foresight, entrepreneurial courage and a desire to establish themselves which made them protagonists of absolute importance in the cultural world of the time .
New publishers joined the old ones, already protagonists of enterprises worthy of being remembered, such as Giuseppe Pomba and Antonio Fortunato Stella, who, in the rush of national rebirth, would be joined by new faces, undisputed protagonists of the future publishing events of the new Risorgimento state , from Felice Le Monnier to Gasparo Barbera, from Salani to Emilio Treves, from Sonzogno to Angelo Sommaruga.
The bestseller, even if it wasn't called that, always remained the forbidden dream, the object of desire, then as in our times, and once certainly with a minor effort in its search, which, then as now, was often the unpredictable fruit and absolutely non-programmable of the publishing activity, unless we were dealing with well-known authors with an already well-established hard core of readers.
Some data
Some data allow us to see more precisely the size of the successful book and the size of the publishing market at the time.
Let's say then that in the years close to national unity the average circulation of a book was around 1000 copies, often even a few hundred, and sometimes it took a few years to run out.
2000 copies were printed when the publisher hoped for a great success and getting rid of them within a year was considered a half miracle.
Moreover, books that were reprinted several times over the course of twelve months were very rare in the first years of the life of the new Kingdom. Only later did things change and the circulations of the bestsellers took on much larger dimensions. In any case, they are by no means negligible numbers taken as a whole and they also demonstrate how Italian publishing in its development has never left its infancy.
New Kingdom Bestsellers: The Classical Tradition
What were the bestsellers in the years in which the history of the newborn Kingdom of Italy was starting? A large portion of the book market of the time was occupied by the texts of our classical literary tradition, from Dante Alighieri onwards. Texts such as the Divine Comedy, Orlando Furioso, Gerusalemme liberata, Jacopo Ortis were real bestsellers. And it was not uncommon to find people who knew entire passages of these works by heart. Not to mention the Betrothed, which fascinated the readers of the time like no other book, and which continued to do so for many decades even after 1861.
The habit of reading the classics lasted at least until the Second World War and beyond, when mass schooling completely altered the parameters of this type of publishing, which nevertheless continued to thrive for a long time as a component of scholastic publishing. The obvious conclusion of this annotation may be that the imaginary of the period was nourished by texts of a cultural, ethical and aesthetic, as well as social and political, depth of the highest level, shaped and forged by works of the caliber of those mentioned.
The Risorgimento tradition
This flourishing production of classic texts of our best literary tradition was accompanied, always in the years close to the unification of Italy, by another type of production, which we would define as Risorgimento, not because it necessarily had a patriotic connotation, even if often the it had, but only to give it the temporal dimension in which it took place, which coincided precisely with the decades of our Risorgimento.
The main works forming part of this Risorgimento legacy were some novels, mostly historical, by Massimo D'Azeglio, Tommaso Grossi, Domenico Guerrazzi, Ignazio Cantù, Giovanni Rosini, Giulio Carcano, Niccolò Tommaseo, by Antonio Bresciani, such as Ettore Fieramosca, Marco Visconti, The Siege of Florence, Margherita Pusterla, The Nun of Monza, Angiola Maria, Faith and Beauty, The Jew of Verona, just to name a few.
To these novels we could add some poetic texts, which, unlike what happens today, achieved a certain success with the public. In particular, it was Giuseppe Giusti who with his poems obtained an appreciable following of readers.
Even some political pamphlets, closely linked to the "admirable" events of the years between the unification of Italy, achieved good levels of sales, to be able to rise to the role of bestsellers, in particular the highly topical "pamphlets" by Carlo Passaglia, abbot and theologian, who left the Jesuit Society for his liberal positions. Let us only recall the case of La excommunication, which came out with an absolutely unusual circulation of 6000 copies for those times, followed a few weeks later by a reprint of 4000 copies. But it was, of course, not the only case.
At the turn of the classical production and that of the Risorgimento, as it can rightfully belong to both, is Manzoni's novel The Betrothed.
And given the relevance of the work and the following of readers it had, it does not seem out of place to summarize its editorial story as much as possible, also because in 1861 it was still the main bestseller in the country.
The case of the Betrothed
The first issue of the Promessi Sposi took place in 1827, at the Ferrario publisher in Milan, which printed 3000 copies. The success was such, "600 copies in twenty days", it was said, that in the following years dozens of illegal editions were printed, i.e. without the author's permission and without paying him the relative royalties, it is estimated for a set of about 200.000 copies, a very high figure for the times. Against these Manzoni had no tools to intervene, as there was no law in force that protected copyright. Also to defend himself against this abuse of reprints, in 1840 Alessandro Manzoni prepared the definitive edition with Guglielmini and Redaelli, who later became Rechiedei. It came out in handouts and would be completed within two years. It was richly illustrated and with a very refined graphic design, which despite the high and unavoidable overall cost, was sold in other tens and tens of thousands of copies.
From an entrepreneurial point of view, however, it is known that it turned out to be a semi-failure, because the high cost of creating the work was never covered and the final balance for our great novelist was absolutely negative. And this also happened because at the same time other publishers continued to publish the novel illegally, at an infinitely lower price than that of the "official" edition, albeit without its valuable illustrations.
But this time Manzoni took legal action against these abusive publishers, as in 1840 a law had been approved that protected copyright. Initially it had been introduced in the Habsburg Kingdom and in the Kingdom of Sardinia, but the following year it was extended to all the other small states of Italy, except the Bourbon Kingdom. And therefore numerous illegal editions continued to appear in the Neapolitan language, without the author having any possibility of objecting.
In other regions, however, this was not the case, and the lawsuit that Manzoni brought against the Franco-Florentine publisher Felice Le Monnier remained famous, guilty of having printed the novel without permission and without paying him the relative royalties. The long dispute between author and publisher ended in 1864 with the payment of the sum, huge for the time, of 34.000 lire, for the more than 24.000 copies illegally printed by Le Monnier. It seems that this was the highest sum ever Manzoni pocketed for his novel.
The new production of the Kingdom of Italy
With the birth of the new kingdom, a new generation of writers appeared in the limelight of the book market, partly already active before national unity, such as Francesco Mastriani (to whom we owe more than 100 serial novels composed in forty years, starting from 1852, with La cieca di Sorrento, until 1889 with La sepolta viva; more famous and renowned than all the mysteries of Naples of 1875), but mostly entered into action after 1861.
This new generation of writers was made up of the names of Edmondo De Amicis, Bruno Barrilli, Salvatore Farina, Paolo Mantegazza, Gerolamo Rovetta, Antonio Fogazzaro, Carolina Invernizio, Emilio Salgari, Annie Vivanti, Luciano Zuccoli. They were the ones who shaped the imagination of Italians in the decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thanks to their works that came out regularly for decades. There were also isolated bestsellers, the work of less fertile authors or at least able to reach the Olympus of sales with only a work or two. And among these we remember Enrichetta Caracciolo, Antonio Stoppani, Emilio De Marchi, Michele Lessona, Carlo Collodi, Emilio Artusi, Umberto Notari, Luigi Bertelli (Vamba).
Among these authors we would like to point out some truly macroscopic cases, which show different types of success, or, better to say, different cases of bestsellers, because if it is true that by this term we all mean the same thing, i.e. the commercially successful book, it is also true that it is accessed in very different ways. The first case to be observed is that relating to Edmondo de Amicis.
De Amicis and the fortune of Heart
The success of De Amicis' books, published regularly for almost forty years, was constant and always of a high standard. His debut as a writer took place in 1868 with Military Life, a true bestseller of the time with its 5000 copies sold out in just one month, followed by countless other reprints, for a total of about 200.000 copies at the time of the author's death. occurred in 1908.
This was his biggest bestseller, after Heart, of course. Numerous other titles followed, all kissed by fortune, albeit to a lesser extent, but still with sales results of several tens of thousands of copies, especially as regards travel books: Spain, Memories of London, Holland, Morocco, Constantinople etc.
The case of Cuore, on the other hand, was truly striking. Released in 1886 after a long gestation, the book overwhelmed all previous sales records. In the months immediately following its release, as many as 1000 copies were being sold a day. At the dawn of the new century the book had exceeded 250.000 copies, in 1910 500.000, in 1923 one million, and since then it has been a succession of new records. Many learned the language just to read Heart, which became one of the bestsellers ever of our national publishing. There were also countless translations, 18 in the first two months of the book's life alone, and then many more.
For his bestseller, De Amicis had concluded a percentage contract with the publisher Treves. But we know that he had done it reluctantly, as he would have preferred a flat-rate contract of 4000 lire for the transfer of rights for 10 years. Evidently he did not have such lofty expectations of the impact of his book on readers, and then the sum requested was still among the highest that authors of the period received. The publisher for his part must have shared more or less the same expectations about the fate of the author's book, and he preferred to enter into a percentage contract, 10% of sales, a contract which he believed would guarantee him more in the event that he believed highly probable, with a not too favorable outcome. And under the conditions desired by the publisher, the contract for Cuore was concluded.
It goes without saying that this contract later proved to be immensely more onerous than the other for the publisher, given that Treves paid the sum of 40.000 lire to De Amicis for the two-year rights alone! But when the books go well, like this one, even the publisher, instead of eating his hands, certainly celebrated with the author and was able to make up for it extensively. However, the basic fact remains of the absolute incapacity of the author and the publisher, moreover both very shrewd in managing their own financial positions respectively, to predict the outcome of the book. However, this also leads us to ask the question whether they were incapable of predicting the outcome of a book, or whether it is absolutely impossible to predict the outcome of a new work a priori. We would opt for this second hypothesis.
Collodi and Pinocchio
Cuore's sales record would only be broken by a book released three years earlier, Pinocchio. This is in fact the greatest publishing success in the history of Italy, superior to all the others, both previous and subsequent, and in all probability also one of the greatest, if not the greatest ever, worldwide.
Its genesis was very complex. Pinocchio was born in 1881 as a short story written for a children's magazine, "The newspaper for children", accompanied by a significant note from the author to the manager of the magazine:
I'm sending you this little girl, do with it what you like; but if you print it, pay me well to make me want to follow it.
This little thing had been written quickly, to get a little money and pay off some gambling debts, a vice that the meager pension that Collodi received as a former theatrical censorship officer, of 60 lire a month, did not allow him to maintain. From the tone we can also deduce the absolute incomprehension if not even the distrust of the fate of his work. The story ends when the cat and the fox hang Pinocchio from a tree.
However, the reception of the readers was such that when the epilogue was reached there was an uprising of the people for the abrupt end of the wooden puppet. So Collodi, at the request of the editor of the magazine, Ferdinando Martini, took up his story and wearily brought it to a conclusion in January 1883.
The success was such that a month later the volume edition was published by the publisher Paggi of Florence, for a fee, for the perpetual sale of the work, it seems, of 1000 lire. A sum that to define as ridiculous is downright offensive, if one considers that in Italy alone, between complete and abridged editions for children, we start from a prudential estimate of 10 million copies, to reach three times as much, and perhaps even more. And only in Italy! If we then think globally what the overall earnings of the author could have been, if he had concluded a contract based on a percentage and not a lump sum, one feels dizzy.
In this De Amicis could have taught him a memorable lesson, if, as we have seen, he too had not been abundantly mistaken in the predictions of his Heart.
The sad case of Salgari
A more pathetic case, but we would add also infinitely more dramatic, was that of Emilio Salgari, an author who received only the crumbs of the extraordinary fortune he created with his fervent imagination. In fact, it is known that a hundred novels came out of his pen, many of extraordinary success, which were however paid with an even different formula, first with the lump sum of 300-350 lire per novel, then with a monthly salary, in settlement of the writing three or four novels a year, plus a few short stories and managing a magazine.
It was a very onerous commitment that forced him to work frenetically, like a true slave to writing. In exchange he received, in fact, a salary, which with the publisher Donath of Genoa was 4000 lire a year. Then Salgari went to Bemporad of Florence for double, 8000 lire a year, the highest figure ever received, but this only happened in the last years of his life, and initially the Florentine publisher withheld half the sum to compensate the publisher Genoese detachment: a kind of release clause of our times. It was no small matter: we have already recalled that the normal salary of a teacher was 1000 lire a year and that figure of 8000 lire a year corresponded to that of top state executives. But if one thinks of the great success of his books, it must be said that they were nothing but pennies.
According to the estimate of his son Omar, Salgari earned a total of 28 lire in the 87.000 years of his career. In 1963 the magazine "Quattrosoldi" estimated that only in that year Salgari would be entitled to 100 million lire of royalties. And they were lyres from the sixties. And instead Salgari always lived on the bill, with a burdensome family on his shoulders, four children, treatment for his wife's mental illness and a not always shrewd management of the family budget. All this led him to suicide at just 49 years old. He killed himself doing harakiri with a kriss, as a character in his novels would have done, not before launching a terrible accusation against his publishers: "To you who have enriched yourselves with my skin, keeping me and my family in continuous semi-misery or even more, I only ask that in return for the earnings that I have given you, you think of my funeral. I greet you by breaking the pen”.
Fogazzaro, D'Annunzio and Verga
Taking up the thread of our discussion, we would like to underline another aspect of the complex history of bestsellers, namely the fact that in those years at the end of the XNUMXth century, among the various successful books, there were also some of undisputed literary value. We are referring to authors such as Fogazzaro and D'Annunzio, to whom circulations of several tens of thousands of copies must be attributed for their main bestsellers, which were respectively Piccolo Mondo Antico and Il Piacere.
For Giovanni Verga, however, the case was still different. In fact, he achieved success not thanks to the works that made him immortal, such as I Malavoglia and Mastro don Gesualdo, since, editorially speaking, these two novels were two sensational fiascos, but by virtue of his first production, the pre-verist one, in particular Story of a blackcap. It was this novel, and in the alternative, but with lower sales, Eva, Eros and the Royal Tiger, that led him to that sales success which would not be repeated in the slightest with the two verist masterpieces.
But here another aspect of the variegated series of bestsellers immediately catches the eye: that is, that the Malavoglia and Mastro don Gesualdo, complete flops in their time, have recovered abundantly after a few decades and today both boast ultra-million dollar circulations, also by virtue of the editions school. Delayed bestsellers, we could define them, a new typology with which we will have to come to terms several times in the future, to better clarify the complex case history of the bestseller.
The Artusi
Once again, the case of Pellegrino Artusi was different, who with Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well, released in 1891, began that line of books on cooking and nutrition that today is predominant in every segment not only of publishing, but of the mass media in general and of the entire social life.
Artusi got off to a decidedly bad start as further proof of the difficulty of intuiting the tastes and tendencies of the public in terms of books and cultural products.
Well, in his time Artusi did not find a publisher who would publish it, who wanted to risk his capital for a book of cooking recipes. And so the author published his book at his own expense, with a Florentine printer. then he took care of its wise management, enriching it each time with new recipes and carefully following it in every phase. In this way, edition after edition, Artusi's book has become one of the major national bestsellers.
Artusi's is one of the first striking success stories of a self-published author, a path that the author of the greatest bestseller of our time, The 5th Shades of Gray, has also completed.
The "Notaries" case
Before concluding the period that goes from the unification of the country to the First World War, we would like to recall another case, absolutely forgotten today, but which deserves to be reported, for the bizarreness with which it won the attention of readers: that of Umberto Notaries.
The story began on the train, when a good priest listened to the complaints of a good young man who could not find a publisher for one of his books. The priest then got busy and finally found him a publisher. The book, entitled Those Ladies, thus came out in 1904 in 3000 copies and in complete anonymity. After ten days, however, it was withdrawn from circulation for a complaint of outrage against modesty, as it described the life of prostitutes, through the story of one of them, named Marchetta. If the good priest had known which book he was working on he would certainly have changed the subject and perhaps even the train.
But, you know, it is also a good work to help a young man make his way in the difficult world of publishing! The trial for outrage against modesty, celebrated two years later, ended with the acquittal of Notari. The publisher then republished the work, with the report of the trial, and here a second complaint was triggered, as the trial had been celebrated behind closed doors, and as such could not be disclosed.
At this point the real "Notari case" broke out, as it was believed that this second denunciation concealed the attempt to limit freedom of the press, and that book became the emblem of a battle between conservatives and progressives, between clericals and anti-clericals, between forces of reaction and emancipation. In this way the book obtained extraordinary visibility and publicity, which made it a spectacular success, made up of hundreds of thousands of copies. This first novel was followed by others, which achieved respectable sales results.
Notari later moved on to the role of publisher, founding newspapers and publishing houses, but continued, during Fascism, also to compose volumes of socio-economic disclosure, which always had their own audience of loyal readers.
