On September 22, a historic Italian publishing house returns to bookshelves, Del Maino, and does so with an American novel never translated into our language, Alamo by Stephen Harrigan, an author born in 1948.
The book, issued in the Bigfoot fiction series, is “a grand historical epic.”
Del Maino’s story is an adventurous one: born as a workshop of printers and booksellers, it was already active between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when, watched by the authorities of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, it boldly circulated the ideas of the French Revolution.
Mauro and Gaetano Del Maino believed that books were meant to help circulate ideas, and it is from that approach that the brand restarts today, at the initiative of the Krèati creative workshop, and under the editorial direction of Nicola Manuppelli.
Direct Distribution and Four Series
A contrarian publishing bet: the “new” Del Maino focuses on direct distribution and on growing one work at a time, with the conviction that books can circulate ideas, alter the way we look at the world, and reach many people without sacrificing, for this reason, intelligence.
The publishing house will be organized into four series: Bigfoot will be devoted to fiction; One Day will collect novels and stories “capable of telling our time”; Kraken will address younger readers; Pamphlet will instead recover “the free and transversal spirit of pamphlets from a past era through texts of the past and new works that are difficult to place in traditional categories, books able to cross genres, topics and forms.”
Moreover, from the new publishing house they explain that the second volume of the Bigfoot series will be published only after the first has sold the first thousand copies.
The Pamphlet by Pasquale Panella
Among the initial authors in the catalog are William Goldman (novelist and screenwriter, twice Oscar-winning), Sue Townsend (the creator of Adrian Mole, among the most beloved English writers of recent decades), Emily Haworth-Booth and the French artist Benoît Debecker.
Del Maino also intends to publish, among its early offerings in the Pamphlet series, Pasquale Panella (with a book titled, precisely, Pamphlet), bringing back to the shelves Alessandro Verri, an author tied to the original history of the publishing house, and, over time, the complete works of Victor Hugo, starting from some unpublished texts.
Paperback Books, Meticulously Crafted in Paper and Layout
“On the path of Penguin’s Anglo-American paperbacks,” Del Maino will present its fiction through paperback volumes, painstakingly designed in paper and layout, with high readability, conceived to stay long in the hands of readers.
The covers will be entrusted to the artist Hurricane Ivan, who designed the Del Maino logo “and who, after a direct dialogue with each work, will give each publication its own autonomous appearance.”
Accompanying Del Maino will be a website, an Instagram page and a cultural Substack, , curated by Antonio Coletta, featuring columns, conversations, videos and contributions from Italian and international writers, journalists, critics and artists, to tell the worlds, the stories and the ideas that orbit around the publishing house, its authors and its books.
