‘Una vera arte e un’arte difficile’: Gian Dàuli editore moderno tra le due guerre

The work is centered on the activity of the Vicentinian publisher Gian Dàuli, (p Ugo Giuseppe Nalato) born in Vicenza on December 9, 1894. The intellectual training and the entire professional career of Gian Dàuli were unraveled during the most controversial phases of the first forty years of the twentieth century. Dàuli is best known for being the first of Jack London's translators (1924) and for creating the editorial series 'Writers of the World' (1928). The work, which is the result of systematic archive research, assumes the burden to an in depth evaluation of the professional life of Dàuli. What emerges is that he was not, as IT has been widely affirmed, a confusing publisher, a man of disorder. The catalogues he set up were not only the result of his eccentric genius. To animate the efforts of Dàuli were firm values, passions and ideals pursued during the long stay in England, the European travels, the Great War. Democracy, social reformism, universal brotherhood, solidarity with the disadvantaged classes were elements that oriented the entire career of the publisher. While the Fascist regime increasingly influenced the spaces of freedom, Dàuli introduced European works of great intellectual inspiration in Italy, anticipating the 'decade of translation' and hoping that foreign literature would stimulate Italian writers to overcome academicism and art prose. Publishing was for Dàuli the means to educate people to beauty and to provide them with conceptual instruments for interpreting reality. He was mocked, despised by critics and excluded from the literary associations that counted. He paid a heavy price for his opposition to the Regime; he was viewed with suspicion by the ecclesiastical hierarchy for his humanitarian laicism. Since 1934 he ceased collaborations with luxury publishing houses, and after many catastrophic failures, he became a consultant editor of the Lucchi publishing house, specialized in low cost editions. He died in Milan on December 29, 1945.