Italian American Book Publishing and Bookselling - James J. Periconi*
What does a study of immigrant foreign-language book culture teach us about the social reality of Italian immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century? We ask this from a bibliographic perspective, broadly conceived, that is, from examining the economic and social conditions of ltalian-language book authorship, production, advertising, distribution, reception, selling at retail, and the evolution of this business from beginnings in the late nineteenth century until after World War II - in effect, bibliography as the sociology of texts.1 We focus on New York City book publishers/ importers and booksellers because of their predominance, but also discuss the most important city outside of New York that reflected a nationwide business competition, namely, San Francisco. Do the popular grammars, "encyclopedias," book catalogues, "secretaries" (books of model business and social letters) and directories, as well as the imaginative works and histories the community's writers produced, help us understand how these immigrants presented themselves to the world, revealed who they were and who they were becoming, intentionally or otherwise?
In recent decades American historians have encouraged the study of immigrant print culture-newspapers, magazines and books-not so much as mere sources of "facts" about those immigrants, but, more interestingly, as a window through which to illuminate the "mentalités and psychic maps" of immigrants in America.2 A few such efforts have been made into the periodical literature (newspapers3 and magazines) of Italian immigrants, but with the exception of one major work there have been only glancing references to the corpus of books produced by immigrants in Italian America during the Great Migration.4 In my prior work, I surveyed Italian-language immigrant books in America as a possible yet unexplored key to making sense of Italian American history.5
This essay now asks several more focused questions about book publishing in pursuit of the same objective, looking more closely at some of the major businesses and actors who made publication possible, that is, the publishers and booksellers themselves, the economic and social conditions under which they worked, and a close look at the most popular publications as a key to understanding their goals and why they enjoyed some economic success.
What drove these book publishers? Were they just trying to make a buck, as entrepreneurs not all that different from those who started construction businesses, fruit stands or asphalt or cement plants? Or, worse, were they developing a compliant and complacent identity for Italian immigrants that was designed only to serve their own economic and political goals, as has often been charged about the publishers of Italian American newspapers?6 Can a case be made that the people in the book trade were at least in part trying to meet an existing need of their customers? Or, more interestingly, in accordance with American-style capitalism, were they trying to create a need (and thus a market) and then make products to supply it?
Whatever their motivation, they used the capitalist tool of advertising, especially in their catalogues, grammars, "encyclopedias" and directories, to sell their wares, not only those works but also the fiction, poetry, histories and other works they produced, for entertainment, and for the instruction of fearful immigrants on how to navigate a stressful and pressured environment.7
Beginnings I:
From Bookstalls and Peddlers to Real Bookstores
Before discussing book publishers, let us review how Italian books were first sold by book importers, or actually, rented in New York (mostly before the book publishers existed).8 We start with book peddlers: A New York Sun newspaper story reports this phenomenon.
"One book peddler told the reporter that for the first privilege of reading an uncut book he charged about a third of the market price. The next half dozen readers paid about 20 cents on the dollar. Finally it ran down by stages as low as 10 cents or even 5 for a week's use, and then the boys on the ferry boats and the like get their turn at it. "And where do you get your books," the walking library was asked.
"'At the banker's,' was the reply.
"Nobody can tell just why all the Italian booksellers in New York except the newspaper publishers are bankers, but they are. Not all the Italian bankers are book sellers, but every bookseller is a banker.9
"There are from a dozen to twenty of them, at least one or two in each Italian center, and some of them do a very large trade. Many thousands of volumes are imported by them every year, chiefly from Milan, Florence and Rome, and besides their local sales one or two of them send out consignments of books to other parts of the country where there are large Italian settlements. Some idea of the extent of the Italian book trade in New York can be formed from the fact that one banker bookseller, one of the largest, publishes a copiously illustrated book catalogue of 176 pages, with a fancy cover.10
"A New York Times story of 1906 colorfully describes what appears to be a somewhat different phenomenon of fixed, open-air bookstalls:
"To see the American Italian at home it is necessary to seek him in the vicinity of Mulberry Bend. After pushing through a mass of shoppers, after just barely escaping a collision with a dozen maidens freighted down with bread, after stuffing up your nostrils to keep out the odor of macaroni and cheese, you will be able to reach the vendors of books.
"What a large assortment, and nearly all of them published with the intent and purpose of being disposed of at a low figure to the populace! No deluxe editions to be seen here; nothing limited about their circulation; no numbered copies; no deckled edges; but all got up in a common paper or a cheap muslin binding. But these books are not intended for exhibition purposes; they are to be read. A single reading in 'Little Italy' does not impair its usefulness; it is passed on to someone else, and as long as the binding lasts on and on it goes.11
"Hurry to one of the bookstalls. Some old friends greet us. Here is "Quo Vadis," there "Resurrection," a bit beyond, "Gil Blas," and right alongside of it is "Decameron." Strain your eyes a mite to catch a glimpse of [other works]. [O]f course, all these books are printed in their language. No bookseller's stock would be complete without a dozen or two works on that great subject of love. . . . Added to these is a large list of novels, exciting enough, and thrilling withal Italy's daughters and sons are by birth of a literary temperament, and it's reasonable to allow that some of their native desire is transplanted here...."
There is a world of information to be unpacked here about bookselling and book renting in Little Italy in this era, as well as about the significance of reading for Italian immigrants.
For starters, book peddlers were, in effect, marketing their wares, hawking books they obtained from "banker booksellers," who were presumably in offices or shops, rather than in dedicated book stores.
The peddlers (with or without encouragement) applied variable rental prices to fit all pocket books. The bookstalls in the New York Times story may or may not have participated in the same method of bookselling described in the first story from the New York Sun.
The backdrop to this is that the illiteracy level of the Italian populace at home, some of whom emigrated, was steadily declining from 1871 to 1911. In Campania, whence many immigrants came, it declined from 85 percent to 54 percent . One factor may have been precisely a belief of many Italians that a literacy test for entry into the United States was imminent.12 Although they often lacked money (or the desire) to purchase books, the immigrants were reading rented works of classical literature-Boccaccio, and Tolstoy and Lesage in Italian as well as the romantic (if not "trashy") novels of Carolina Invernizio, that were then very popular in Italy.
Booksellers were clearly plentiful in this world: the reporter's quick count - "from a dozen to 20" - in New York, with "at least one or two in each Italian center," doing "a very large trade," suggests both popularity and the competition that went with there being so many purveyors of the same types of materials. There was also a beneficial effect in having proximate bookstalls that would cause shoppers to linger. The likely reason that all the booksellers "are also" bankers is a simple one. It took capital to buy "thousands" of volumes from what were probably Milanese, Roman or Florentine booksellers somewhat skeptical of the business reliability of Mezzogiorno Italians. And it would take capital - at least, for those of the booksellers who were, or would soon become, publishers as well, and thus usually also printers of their own works - to purchase printing presses and boxes of typeface, and rent quarters spacious enough to do such work.13 The rental of books, as well, suggests collateral facts: the immigrant could stretch his limited entertainment pennies on these cheaply printed books that were read and reread by immigrants who probably saw little reason to retain copies of them, but preferred rental (or borrowing from the library) to purchase.14 Middlemen peddlers could also earn a living in this business, along with writers and publishers.
Above all, the selling of books in book stalls - one of which was that of a major player in our story, Antonio De Martino, before he owned a bookstore and household goods emporium-mixed with the "odor of macaroni and cheese" suggests strongly that books were needed, purchased and consumed much like other daily household goods. Indeed, this is a recurrent theme: books as just another "commodity" of the Italian immigrant household.15 One sees it in the "emporia" of Francesco Tocci and Antonio De Martino, discussed later, that would define the successful capitalist enterprise of book publishing, bookselling, including, along with the American products, imported works bearing the logo of the New York booksellers as "unique repository in the U.S."16 These imported works made up the bulk of their stock in the early years, but were then supplemented by the generation and sale of American Italian works. For the bankers, as well, book reading would help encourage assimilation into American ways, including that American habit of saving regularly with deposits made at the local Italian bank.
Beginnings II: Early Booksellers and Bookstores
In addition to the outdoor bookstalls, which seemingly were not advertised in newspapers any more than would fruit or vegetable stalls, bookseller advertisements identifying actual bookstores (with addresses), only occasionally associated with bankers, abounded surprisingly early in newspapers; and, as with the outdoor bookstalls, much of their stock was imported from Italy. One page of L'Eco d'Italia [The Echo of Italy] in 1891 contained advertisements from no fewer than three different booksellers, including Giovanni Cereghino's Libreria ltaliana [Italian Bookstore], which offered school books, grammars, novels, and the opera libretti of Meschino, among other categories, both for sale and for "rent" (actually referred to as a '"temporary' deposit") at 50 cents per month. Cereghino's advertisement also listed various devotional works, the John Milhouse Italian-English dictionary produced in England, books to learn English, and the Bible.17
The other two booksellers on this page of the Eco were Libri d'Oro [Golden Books], at 401 Hudson Street "and other locations," run by Augusto Bassetti; and the newspaper's own Libreria dell'Eco d'Italia [Echo of Italy Bookstore], then located at 22 Centre Street. All of the works on offer appear to have been imports.
By 1896, however, by which time novels had written in America and published by Italian American publishers, the bookstore of Il Progresso Italo-Americano [The Italian- American Progress] carried the eight novels of Bernardino Ciambelli that had been published in the United States since 1891.18
By 1919, about twenty-eight or twenty-nine years after the 1891 advertisement, the Strenna almanacco anno 1919 e Catalogo Almanacco della Libreria Banca Tocci [Free Almanac for the year 1919 and Catalogue-Almanac of the Tocci Bank Bookstore], located at 89 Park Street, New York, had become the successor to the catalogue of the earlier Libreria dell'Eco d' Italia [Bookstore of L'Eco d' Italia]. (See Figure 15.1.)
Bookseller catalogues are, at least nowadays, considered a tool for a segment of a larger class of readers, namely, moneyed, well-educated ones. It seems surprising that late nineteenth and early twentieth- century Italian immigrants would have had the leisure and interest sufficient to peruse a lengthy catalogue, a fairly rich variety of tastes in reading, and the discretionary funds needed to satisfy desires beyond the necessities of life. The gracious air of the prefatory note, "To our Readers," which proclaimed the wish "to be able to be useful to you as we have been for a half-century," despite restrictions caused by World War I, assumes as much.
The 1919 catalogue contains 165 pages of advertisements, mostly for books in categories that were quite diverse. There were "marvelous novels," and books that belonged to a " historical library." A "social library" included translated works by Tolstoy and Gorky. Among the "rare editions" were I misteri di Parigi [The Mysteries of Paris] written by the popular Frenchman Eugene Sue, which are thought to be the forerunner of the "I misteri'' series of greatest of the American Italian novelists, Bernardino Ciambelli.19 The catalogue included a "practical scientific library," a list of "stories and popular novellas" and also such classics as Dante's Divine Comedy and the poetry of Giosue Carducci, alongside a healthy selection of dictionaries for French, German, Latin and Greek in addition to Italian and English.
Though the publishing provenance of these works (i.e., whether in Italy or the United States) is not stated in the catalogue, it appears that many of them were still being imported from (and published in) Italy. Yet an increasing number were clearly being published by (or, in some cases, imported from Italy, but as sole distributors, by) the Italian Book Company, which will be discussed later. In the latter regard, the catalogue included sheet music, chromolithographs (and other art work), among which are two rather stunning works reflecting the war raging in Europe at that time, published by the Italian Book Company of New York, to which we now turn our attention.
Arrival: Francesco Tocci, Antonio De Martino, and the Societa Libraria Italiana, the Italian Book Company
It was in this late-nineteenth- century/ early-twentieth century atmosphere in New York that there arrived several commercial Italian book publishers.20 The first major Italian-language book publisher of the first half of the twentieth century was the Società Libraria Italiana or Italian Book Company of New York (IBC), founded by Francesco Tocci and Antonio De Martino.
The first of these co-founders, Tocci was one of the bankers referenced in the early twentieth-century news articles. His venture into book publishing, as opposed to bookselling, had begun with the acquisition in 1891 by his uncle Felice Tocci (owner of the Banca Tocci) of L'Eco d' Italia, the very first Italian-language newspaper in the United States, founded in 1850. Francesco had worked in the 1890s at his uncle Felice's Libreria dell'Eco d' Italia and also at the Libreria Banca Tocci. Before Francesco started the IBC, he published several language teacher/authors under the imprint of the IBC's progenitor, Francesco Tocci Editore, also known as The Emporium Press. "The Emporium Press/F. Tocci" published books as early as 1901,21 and its authors included (in 1906, 1909, 1910) Giuseppe Cadicamo, an editor of L'Eco d' Italia and founder of an Italian boarding school in Queens to teach immigrants Italian; and, more significantly, Alfonso Arbib-Costa, a City College professor.
Arbib-Costa wrote a popular lesson book for Italians learning the English language called Lezioni graduate di lingua inglese [Step-by-Step Lessons in the English Language], copyrighted in 1906. Arbib-Costa's equally popular Italian Lessons for English speakers states that it was first published in 1908 by "Francesco Tocci ed.," and copyrighted by Tocci in 1909. In 1910 the copyright to Arbib Costa's Italian Lessons was assigned to Tocci's second, more enduring publishing company, the IBC.22 With the IBC, Italian Lessons went through many editions to an eighth "revised" edition in 1933.
An even shrewder capitalist than Francesco Tocci was the other IBC co-founder, Antonio De Martino. With Tocci, De Martino created the IBC in 1901,23 having started before then in his case with a bookstall on Mulberry Street.24 That De Martino was a shrewd business man is evident from the way the company soon boasted, on its letterhead, a capitalization of $250,000--a boast that was no doubt critical for importing works, as well as required by Italian law, especially since as an importer of ltalian titles De Martino often sought exclusive U.S. rights as distributor. De Martino was the first treasurer of the IBC, while Tocci was the first president. The younger De Martino, after Tocci's death, became its proprietor and possibly sole owner for decades, well into the 1950s, when the "Libreria [bookstore] De Martino, Inc. (Italian Book Company)" seemed to have displaced the former bookseller/ publisher IBC.
What Made Money for the IBC?
Besides the Arbib-Costa books, the IBC's most popular works in Italian, to judge by the many editions and printings they went through, and the many copies of the work that have survived, were Angelo De Gaudenzi's Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata [Newest Accelerated Grammar] and Giuseppe Molinari's 1917 Raccolta di discorsi per ogni occasione [Collection of Speeches for All Occasions], bound together with Riccardo Cordiferro's Brindisi ed augurii [Toasts and Greetings]. De Gaudenzi's book was copyrighted by him personally in 1896 and 1900, after which he sold its copyright to the IBC.
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Figure 15.2 Cover photo of 1914 Edition, Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata of Angelo De Gaudenzi
https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:6e49dfdc-2962-43fb-99b8-e8844c5f9499
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Unlike most of the IBC's works, which were bound inexpensively in wrappers and printed on inexpensive paper, this work was (like Arbib-Costa's grammar books) bound in boards. On the front cover of a 1914 edition printed for a bank in Cleveland (as on the cover of earlier editions), it even promised to be a "complete course for learning to write, speak and understand the English language in a brief time without a teacher." The ability of, and importance for, Italian immigrants with sufficient Italian language reading skills to teach themselves American English in America "with out a teacher" cannot be overstated.25 They could improve their Italian-not only because the work is largely in Italian, but also because the bilingual model correspondence contained therein promoted improvement-and thereby to become book readers in America (as they were not in Italy). The front cover self-description (if not out-and-out advertisement) noted that this 1914 IBC edition had grown into twelve parts, having added a brief history of the United States, and updated contemporary events, as if to counter the oft-made criticisms of the Italian periodical press that it failed to educate readers about their adopted country.26
Indeed, the Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata became something of a publishing phenomenon, enduring at least seventy years (from 1896 to the mid-1960s), most of which were with the IBC, of which De Gaudenzi was the Corporate Secretary. In the post-IBC book store years it was sold by the Libreria De Martino, Inc., which was reportedly directed in the 1950s and 1960s by De Martino and then his daughter.27 The most recent edition so far to have been located of the Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata, published in 1963, states that the copyright is held by the IBC as publisher, although the bookseller is listed as the Libreria De Martino at the IBC's Mulberry Street shop. This later (perhaps final) edition mentioned the death of Pope John XXIII on 3 June 1963. There were still multiple sections, including an Italian-English vocabulary for a variety of situations, model letters in Italian and English for business and personal affairs; and, as in earlier editions, this one provided advice in Italian about American citizenship and the right to vote, adding a section on the U.S. Constitution.
Astonishingly, as if neither reading tastes nor anything else had changed from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this 1960s edition of the Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata also contained seven pages of advertisements for Italian books, printed at the beginning and end of the volume. The books included a large selection of ltalian-English dictionaries and grammars, many of them imported works that had been on sale already in the 1880s and 1890s. The books advertised even included the Nuovissima Grammatica itself as well as an abbreviated version. Also advertised were conversation manuals and the ever-present "segretario"28 with model social and business letters,29 as well as an Italian-Spanish dictionary, Italian-French conversation manuals, and religious and spiritual books.
There is something poignant here in the advertising plea (in Italian), utterly unnecessary in the earlier years, to "give the opportunity to your children to learn the Mother Tongue, Italian." One imagines De Martino's daughter holding onto a still sizeable stock of imported works no longer of use or interest in the 1960s to the non-Italian-speaking children and grandchildren of the immigrant generation.
One of the other advertisements was for the other highly popular IBC work-again judging from the relatively large number of copies that survive - Molinari's Raccolta di discorsi, which was first printed and marketed by the IBC in 1917, when it was bound together with Cordiferro's Brindisi ed augurii. Some copies were printed in Italy as late as 1922 or 1923, despite 1917 still listed the ostensible year of publication, and some in the United States. See discussion of the two copies - one each printed in Italy and in the U.S. - in the collection. The editors of the Molinari/Cordiferro work professed their desire to provide speeches, toasts and greetings that could be read and used by "every class within the [Italian] Colony." The editors preface the work with constant references to what is needed and useful in "the Colony" of about 600,000 Italian immigrants, so as to be "accessible to every [level of] intelligence ... that deals with material that is so different and subjects so disparate."
In a slightly defensive tone, Molinari declares that the Colony is unfairly attacked for having so many balls, banquets, picnics, parades and "similar foolish things," when the six hundred or so associations that hold these events are part of the greatness of this - one of the largest Italian cities - in demonstrating love of the Fatherland. Thus, he provides a model speech in honor of King Victor Emmanuel II, one for Garibaldi, and several speeches in honor of the Italian flag, but also for Decoration Day, Thanksgiving and a few other American holidays. Elsewhere in this three-author work (besides Molinari and Cordiferro, one Modestino Sessa contributed a six-page Part 6), there are speeches for a variety of organizations, and for family gatherings.
In a later version printed in Italy in or about 1923, there was an eleven-page section entitled "The New Fascist Italy," celebrating the 1922 March on Rome and the entry of ltaly in World War I, although this would of course not be found in the 1917 American edition.
Competition
There was one significant competitor of De Gaudenzi's Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata, namely, Alberto Pecorini's Grammatica-enciclopedia italiana-inglese per gli italiani degli Stati Uniti [Italian English Grammar-Encyclopedia for Italians in the United States].30 For the Nicoletti Bros. press, which published it for forty years, the Grammatica-enciclopedia probably served the same purposes De Gaudenzi's Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata for the IBC. The book's cover declares the aim of the work is to help the reader "learn the English language without a teacher," much as De Gaudenzi's previous work had claimed in its early editions. The "encyclopedia" part of the work put language acquisition into action, with instruction on how to navigate the difficulties of this foreign land. First published in 1911, reprinted in 1912, taken over by the Libreria Nuova Italia Editore, by 1919 according to the title page (on the verso of which it was stated that the copyright was held by the New Italy Book Co. of New York), it was reprinted in 1935 and as late as 1949, also by the Libreria Nuova Italia.
Like De Gaudenzi's work, Pecorini's contained sections on American citizenship as well as the expected pronunciation and rules of grammar section, model letters for business and family, Italian-English dialogues and ads for both Italian-English and English-Italian dictionaries. Pecorini had earlier observed the problem of Italians in America not knowing their own language.31 As Pecorini carefully explained (in Italian) his preface to this work, his own, made-in-America grammar/ encyclopedia could be the mechanism for semiliterate Italians "of the middle class" who had not achieved the upper levels of elementary schooling in Italy, "but who nevertheless had a knowledge of the Italian language that made them able to appreciate a good and practical grammar," and thereby gain confidence to navigate in the New World.32
Booksellers and the Capitalist Spirit
Business records reveal that De Martino was a savvy businessman who used the capital he somehow obtained-perhaps through Tocci and his uncle's bank, although no firm evidence has been found - for a variety of useful purposes.33 One important purpose was to get copyright protections wherever he could; nor did he hesitate to sue those who, in his view, infringed on the IBC's copyright or exclusive rights to distribute imported works. From a review of the litigation files, it appears that the scope of copyright protection or exclusive rights that De Martino seems to have bargained for was never as clear as he claimed: De Martino sometimes lost on his claims of expansive rights.
He also vigorously defended copyright infringement charges against the IBC. As with twentieth-century publishers, key to the economic success of the venture was having at least a couple of repeat sellers as a base to permit the venture 's survival, and even experimentation and expansion. On the basis of survival rates, De Gaudenzi's Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata, Molinari/Cordiferro's Raccolta di discorsi/Brindisi e augurii and Arbib-Costa's works were good sellers, perhaps even blockbusters, and not far behind were the various "secretaries" that seemed to emanate periodically from the IBC in many varieties, as noted.
As well as serving a crucial social function - to help immigrants learn English through using their nascent Italian - these grammars, "encyclopedias," secretaries and similar works served a crucial business function beyond the income generated in their decades of sales for the publishers: these works helped create a marketplace34 of book-buying readers. It started by their importing Italian-English dictionaries, readers and grammars, but then advanced to the writing and publishing their own, grammars and the like. But they also helped create a class of readers eager to learn not only English in general, but who also needed to learn Italian, with De Gaudenzi's Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata, for example, providing both Italian and English vocabulary (with pictures) for mechanics, gardeners, metalsmiths, stonecutters, tailors, electricians and carpenters, among others.
And immigrants could learn how to become more Italian (than Neapolitan, Sicilian, etc.) than they could become in the old country, by developing a taste for literature as perhaps never before. These works built on the preparation immigrants made in Italy for their journey to America, as Pecorini had declared his intentions in the preface to his Grammatica-Enciclopedia: to build on the knowledge the average Italian worker in the United States had of Italian, even without having achieved the higher grades of elementary school in Italy, to be able to use a practical grammar for an Italian to learn English "without a teacher," but also to improve their Italian language skills.35
Directories and the Capitalist Spirit
Before turning to the literature that Italians created, and then craved reading, in America, one further class of evidence informs us about full participation by the Italian-language book industry in the American capitalist spirit: the directories. These contain much useful information about booksellers36 and publishers"37 in New York in the early twentieth century. For example, Angelo De Gaudenzi took out a full-page ad in Italian in the 1905 Italian American Directory, as both "publisher and bookseller," importer of books of all the leading Italian publishers, indeed, calling his shop "the greatest Italian Bookstore in the United States." He pitched his ability to help setup of bookstores "in whatever part of the United States." Upon request, he would send a "prospectus" for doing this "at the cheapest prices."
He also trumpeted his own Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata, discussed earlier. Handsomely bound (like the grammars) in boards (not wrappers), the Italian directories served a unique function of taking occasional stock of the progress of Italians in America, measuring the numbers and breadth of the Italian colony throughout the country at various times, by state and often by occupation, a kind of declaration of how far the Italian colony had advanced in business. Despite their issuance typically in Italian, they formed a critical measure of just how much Italians believed themselves to have been assimilated, integrated into American society; and thus they merit our special attention.
The first directory or almanac to be found in the East, according to Pietro Russo, was published in January 1862, followed by others.38 Another nineteenth-century directory was the Guida degli italiani in America: strenna 1893 dell' Eco d'Italia, ii più antico ed il più diffuso giornale italiano in America [Guide of the Italians in America: Gift for 1893 of L'Eco d'Italia, the Oldest and Most Widely Distributed Italian Newspaper in America]. In the West, there were the Italian-Swiss catalogs, such as the Primo Almanacco Italosvizzero Americana, published by J. F. Fugazi in 1881; and the Almanacco Illustrato Dell'Elvezia published in 1895 by the Libreria e Tipografia del Giornale L'Elvezia [Bookstore and Press of the Newspaper L'Elvezia]. Later in New York, the 1905 Italian American Directory: Guida generale per ii commercio italo-americano [General guide for the Italian American trade] (New York: Italian American Directory Co.); the 1906 Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti d'Arnerica, by the same publisher; and the biographical almanac, Italiani di America of Ario Flamma (editions of 1936, 1941, 1949).
In its very physical makeup, the 1905 Italian American Directory reflects this jostling and jockeying for position in the New World: the cover is crowded with multicolored pictorial as well as textual advertisements for sellers of wine and olive oil (with handsome bottles of each stamped on the cloth cover) and real estate, with an ad for The Atlantic Macaroni Company very close to one for the Banca Cuneo.
Even the fore-edge of the book has a stamped advertisement: Maffei & Co., a Manhattan importer of and agent for food products and wines. Attempting to fill the same need that American city directories had since the early nineteenth century filled before there were telephone books, this directory is notable for its national (and international) scope. Names and addresses of Italians in the directory were organized by borough (within New York City) and then by trade. Italians in forty-four of the then forty-eight states, as well as Washington, DC, were listed by name, and organized by city or county and trade. A demographic map of the United States shows the distribution of Italians across the country, and population in each state.
The directories also provide information about publishers and booksellers nationwide. Besides five San Francisco publishers and one bookseller, four publishers were listed in Philadelphia; in Chicago, four publishers though no Italian booksellers; and in Newark, two publishers but no booksellers. The 1906 Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti d'Arnerica was the result of the organizing committee of the 1906 Milan Exposition directing Italian chambers of commerce around the world to prepare a volume in a series about Italians abroad. "39 This ambitious work, in an impressive, elephant folio format, measuring 15 7/8 inches long by 11 1/8 inches wide, on thick, glossy stock, contains essays in the first part by an all-star cast of Italian writers, from then inspector of immigration, Adolfo Rossi on Italian manpower in the United States, Italian language teacher Arbib-Costa on Italians in public schools, Alfredo Bosi on the failure of the Italian colony in New York to establish a true Italian school there, Bernardino Ciambelli on "Columbus Day" and others.
The second part, comprising 290 of the 473-page total, is a directory of advertisements and summaries of Italian American businesses that undoubtedly paid for the privilege. It is here that Francesco Tocci set out on his ambitious book publishing program described next.
National Competition among Booksellers
Competition was not only for local business or consumer customers. Tocci in his Emporium Press in the 1906 Directory, and Angelo De Gaudenzi in the 1905 Directory, like Giovanni Cereghino before them, advertised that they sold books both at wholesale and retail.
Other documents reflect that competition abounded, especially from San Francisco: as early as 1881 there, an ad for M.G. Tonini's Libreria Italiana, at 26 Montgomery Street, "Importer and Dealer in Foreign and Domestic Books and Stationery," appeared in the Primo Alrnanacco Italosvizzero Americana, as did others. In an 1895 Almanacco Illustrato Dell' Elvezia, published by the Libreria e Tipografia del Giornale L' Elvezia, the Libreria Italiana of George F. Cavalli, at the offices of the newspaper itself, was the "only Italian bookstore in California," perhaps having replaced Tonini's, with a great assortment of books of all types, especially school books. Cavalli's Libreria Italiana claimed its book prices were "lower than those of Italian bookstores of New York."
What Else Did the IBC Publish?
In creating a market for the reading of Italian by immigrants to serve other than purely practical needs, what body of work did the IBC generate? The approximately forty original works published by the IBC (i.e., not including the several hundred imported works, or scores of sheet music,40 music rolls and the like) may seem modest, but the work of finding them is hardly over. Numbers increase any time a new search engine permits a broader or deeper search by publisher; I have examined copies of about twenty of them . Virtually all were printed in the United States, as well as being published here; a few were not . Over the years since the founding of the company, as if running the business were not enough, De Martino himself became an author of several IBC best sellers.41
Other titles include fiction, such as three novels by Ciambelli, and non-fiction, such as Pallavicini's La guerra italo-austriaca (1915-1919) [The Italo-Austrian War, 1915-1919](published in 1919), as well as (in the "memoir" category) Casanova: memorie d' avventure amorose [Casanova: Memoirs of Amorous Adventures] (published in 1944), and perhaps most famously,42 De Martino's own L'assassinio della Contessa Trigona [The Assassination of Countess Trigona] (published in 1919 and again in 1944).
As for the imported works, usually right under the name of the actual publisher there was printed in Italian a statement to the effect that the Italian Book Company, 142-144 Mulberry Street, New-York, is "the only distributor in the U.S"; or in English, or in English, after the IBC's name and address, the declaration "This copy can be imported in the U.S. of A. only by Italian Book Co. of New-York."
Of the American Italian writers, the most important of these was Ciambelli, the most prolific and probably most significant chronicler in fiction of the life of the "colonia italiana" in New York and in the larger world of New York for more than thirty years in about twenty novels.43 The IBC published three of them. Most began life as appendix literature in newspapers or magazines such as La Follia di New York [The New York Folly].44 Nothing written by immigrants in English quite captured the gritty world of the ghetto, the class separation of immigrants from world of Americans or the conflict between American-born children and their Italian parents, as the novels of Bernardino Ciambelli; or the despair experienced by many of immigrants in being excluded from American society as the reportage of Adolfo Rossi of the Five Points in Manhattan and other aspects of his lite in America.
At the same time, perhaps borrowing the most important lesson from the sales of books at outdoor bookstalls that characterize the earliest period, the two major booksellers in New York integrated the sales of books in their emporia, such as Tocci's and IBC's, for decades so that book buying became as ordinary, as integrated into regular purchases, as buying kitchen utensils. The IBC also imported manuals for gardening and other useful domestic occupations, where there was less need to create an American version, but generated immigrant novels and books of poetry, in Italian, to reflect and, as one of the major scholars45 has noted about the literature, negotiate the terrifying and stressful experience of the New World.
What Drove De Martino (and the Italian Book Company) and Tocci?
How important was the IBC in the Italian colony? Can we glean anything from the record reflecting how the colony viewed the publishers? In fact, others did recognize the importance of the IBC: Among the least filiopietistic, the Federal Writers Project The Italians of New York called the IBC "one of the most important wholesale and retail Italian book shops in the city,"46 pointing out in the Italian edition published later that the prominence of the IBC as wholesale and retail bookseller extended throughout the country, consistent with De Martino's self-promotion.47
Years afterward, Italo Stanco, now as then regarded as a successful, sophisticated novelist, praised De Martino in Divagando [Roaming],48 a large-circulation Italophone weekly cultural journal, as someone who was a "pioneer" who "refined the crude minds of the humbler Italian immigrants of more than a half-century ago," immigrants who lived "in the mean dens of the Five Points, of Mott, Mulberry and Elizabeth Streets." Starting in one of the small bookstalls on Mulberry Street about which we heard earlier, squeezed between many others, De Martino took the IBC to the glory of the large "emporium" it later occupied at 145-47 Mulberry Street. The "indefatigable bookseller-editor" De Martino possessed literary and artistic properties of "thousands" of works of every type, from novels to songs. To obtain many of these "properties," as Stanco calls them, De Martino "commuted" between New York and his beloved native Naples - where he stayed anywhere from two to thirteen months.
Finally, Il Progresso Italo-Americano,49 in 1956 celebrated the sailing of De Martino's ship from New York, his fifty-third Atlantic crossing to his native Italy "to enrich this bookstore with all the newest and most interesting publications that see the light of day in Italy" in order to develop an unrivaled selection for his American public, and to be able to offer the most complete and varied collection, "all in Italian."50 His trips, the article emphasizes, were not pleasure trips, but excursions of "bibliographic research" that enhanced his flourishing book business. The IBC's business records show that De Martino arranged book deals and translation deals with leading Italian authors, or, alternatively, he developed book distribution arrangements with Italian publishers such as Fratelli Bocca of Torino.51 This insured that, much as Lorenzo Da Ponte had done a century before in importing into, and distributing Italian imprints in, the United States, new political, economic, social and literary ideas from Italy were made available to Italians here as well as that part of the American public who could read Italian.
As for Tocci, he described his own goals at a much earlier time in a four-page spread in the 1906 Directory (Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti d'America, noted previously) in terms similar to those that would be used about De Martino retrospectively in the 1950s.The goals for his publishing venture (The Emporium Press, also known as Francesco Tocci, ed.) that immediately preceded the Società Libraria Italiana, harked back to its beginnings in 1895, when he separated from his uncle, Felice, whose Libreria dell' Eco d' Italia had become in time the Libreria Banca Tocci [Tocci Bank Bookstore] on Park Street in New York. Francesco wrote there had been in 1895 "several Italian booksellers in New York, whose stock consisted principally of popular literature, sold at high prices."52 (Among these several booksellers was Giovanni Cereghino, discussed earlier). Tocci's idea for his Emporium, however, included the "largest possible deposit of Italian books of all types, excelling certainly in works of easy going tales of chivalry, which are the works most highly sought by our people," but where could be found as well a "varied assortment of literary and modern works."
His shop, he continued, ordered crates of books from Italy of all types, and offered to send packages of books throughout North America. Though many of them were "school books or works of amusing literature," like the popular novels in Italy written by Carolina Invernizio or tales of chivalry, Tocci noted with evident pride that one could also find in his shop works of the "best modern literature," like those by Gabriele D'Annunzio and Giosue Carducci. Noting that he is a cultured man with good taste, he promised one day to make a gift of such modern literary works, "good Italian books," to the Italian colony, but also for "studious Americans," "quite a few of whom know our language."53 Six large photos are spread over three pages following this page of text (which itself contained a photo of the dashing Tocci), including one of the printing operation's composition room and printing press room.
Conclusions
The major Italian immigrant book publishers were advanced practitioners of capitalism, but they also sought to educate and raise the fortunes of immigrants. The readers of the books in the Italian community, for their part, were clearly the strivers and dreamers: sufficiently literate in Italian in preparing to emigrate, they found a way in the New World to read a wide variety works in Italian, including along with Italian originals, French and Russian novels and stories in translation. At the same time, they used their modest skills in Italian to teach themselves English, at their own pace, "without a teacher." They consumed books as they consumed other commodities, to survive and to thrive in the often hostile environment of the New World, to learn written communication from model letters in both languages. And the process evolved over time: from the impulse rentals, if not purchases, from crowded, competing bookstalls among the food stalls on Mulberry Street in the early years, to handsomely designed catalogues selling the widest variety of books imaginable both for instruction and for entertainment, in order to satisfy their cravings; from there to the grand emporia with bookstores that became more prevalent in the course of the first decades of the twentieth century.
Despite the many gaps in the record - no records have been found to date to suggest the actual numbers of copies printed of any of these books - the multiple editions and printings of several popular works in Italian, some lasting four decades and some as long as seven decades, suggest the popularity and great importance of the major tools of self-education and self-advancement: grammars and "encyclopedias," with dictionaries and bilingual model letters, and belie the popular image of illiterate peasants poorly equipped for life in twentieth-century America.
* Ch. 15, Routledge History of Italian Americans, ed. William J. Connell, Stanislao G. Pugliese (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 252-267.
Further Reading
Durante, Francesco. Italoamericana:The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943. Francesco Durante, Editor. Robert Viscusi, General Editor of the American Edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
Periconi, James J. Strangers in a Strange Land: A Catalogue of an Exhibition on the History of Italian-Language American Imprints (1830-1945) (New York: Grolier Club, 2012).
Notes
1. The phrase was invented by Donald E. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also G. Thomas Tanselle, "Introduction," and Robert Darnton, "What Is the History of Books?" both in Books and Society in History, ed. Kenneth E. Carpenter (New York: Bowker, 1983), xvii- xxiii and 3-26, for succinct descriptions of somewhat different conceptions of histoire du livre, each departing from the traditional understanding of bibliography.
2. Joshua A. Fishman, Language Loyalty in the United States: The Maintenance and Perpetuation of Non-English Mother Tongues by American Ethnic and Religious Groups (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), as cited by Rudolph J. Vecoli, "The Italian Immigrant Press and the Construction of Social Reality, 1850-1920," in Print Culture in a Diverse America, eds. James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 17-33. The quote is from Robert Harney, "The Ethnic Press in Ontario," Polyphony: The Bulletin of the Multicultural Historical Society of Ontario, 4 (Spring/ Summer 1982), 7.
3. On the prominenti, as well as the radical press, by far the most significant such work is that of Durante, Italoamericana [American ed.], 81- 365. See also, Vecoli, "The Italian Immigrant Press," 18-24; and Peter G. Vellon, A Great Conspiracy Against Our Race: Italian Immigrant Newspapers and the Construction of Whiteness in the Early 20th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2014). Much more has been written on the radical press, especially in the years since Durante: see Durante, Italoamericana [American ed.], 551- 788; Vecoli, "The Italian Immigrant Press," 24-28; Marcella Bencivenni, Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 67- 98; and Bénédicte Deschamps, " De la presse 'coloniale' à la presse italo-américaine: le parcours de six périodiques italiens aux Etats-Unis (1910- 1935)," Ph.D thesis, Université de Paris 7, (1996).
And even more recently, perhaps the last word generally, especially on the forces affecting the news and editorial contents of the newspapers in these years, see Bénédicte Deschamps' magisterial Histoire de la presse italo-américaine: Du Risorgimento à la Grande Guerre (Paris: L'Harmattan 2020).
4. See Vecoli,"The Italian Immigrant Press," 18, 26.
5. See James J. Periconi, Strangers in a Strange Land: A Catalogue of an Exhibition on the History of Italia- Language American Imprints (1830 - 1945) (New York: Grolier Club, 2012).
6. See, e.g., George E. Pozzetta, "The Italian Immigrant Press of New York City: The Early Years, 1880- 1925," Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1.3 (Fall 1973), 32-46;Vecoli, "The Italian Immigrant Press," 24. For a contemporary's charge of this kind, see Carlo Tresca, " II fascista Gene Pope è un uomo di paglia", Il Martello (14 November 1934), translated in Durante, Italoamericana [American ed.], 775- 778: "The fascist Gene Pope is a man of straw."
7. See Martino Marazzi, A occhi aperti: letteratura dell'emigrazione e rnito americano (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2011), passim, for this view of the function of the literature of Italians in America.
8 By "first sold," I mean during the mass migration in the late nineteenth century, skipping the sui generis early nineteenth-century Italian book importing and bookselling efforts of Lorenzo Da Ponte in New York. See also Periconi, Strangers, 45.
9. Though some of the booksellers were indeed also bankers, such as the Tocci's, by no means were all or even the majority of booksellers also bankers. One theory of how the reporter came to be confused may have been playfulness by the young book-hawkers, who had some awareness that historically, in Italy, street bookdealers are called "bancarellieri," selling their wares from "bancarelle" (stalls).
10. Quoted in Eliot Lord, John Trenor and Samuel Barrows, The Italian in America (New York: R. E. Buck, 1905), 246-247. The "176-page catalogue" is possibly an early catalogue for the bookseller-banker, Felice Tocci, advertised in L'Eco d' Ttalia in 1891. A later (1919) edition of this catalogue is discussed later.
11. New York Times Saturday "Review of Books" (31 March 1906), BR201.
12. Carlo M. Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 19, 94- 97, 127, and Ercole Sori, L'emigrazione italiana dall'unità alla seconda guerra mondiale (Bologna: il Mulino, 1979), 205-211, cited in Vecoli, "The Italian Immigrant Press," 17.
13. That banks have historically been critical in the development of printing and publishing is well known among book historians. See, e.g., the " Introduction," (especially 25 et seq.) to The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, 1695-1830, eds. Michael F. Suarez, S. J. and Michael L. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially 25ff.
14. As early as 1894 the Anson Phelps Stokes Italian Free Library at 149 Mulberry Street in Manhattan made most of the same works available for free. See Alexandra de Luise, "The Italian Immigrant Reads: Evidence of Reading for Learning and Reading for Pleasure, 1890s-1920s," Italian Americana, 30.1 (Winter 2013), 33- 43.
15. This idea, too, is canonical in the study of book history; see, e.g., James Raven, "The Book as Commodity," in The Cambridge History of the Book in England, eds. Suarez and Turner, 5: 85-117.
16. See, e.g., William Galt (pseud. Luigi Natoli), Mastro Bertuchello e il Tesoro dei ventimiglia (Milan: La Madonnina, 1951).
17. L' Eco d'ltalia (31 January 1891), 2.
18. Il Progresso Italo-Americano (5 July 1896), S4.
19. Franca Bernabei's "Little Italy's Eugene Sue: The Novels of Bernardino Ciambelli," in Adjusting Sites: New Essays in Italian American Studies, ed. William Boelhower and Rocco Pallone (Stony Brook: Forum Italicum, 1999), 3-56.
20. This essay excludes discussion of the radical book press, a topic that merits its own full, and rather different discussion.
21. Located at 145 Spring Street, as late as 1915, as a printer it boasted that though its prices were no higher than those of other printers, its high quality work could be compared only with that of the "best of American establishments." From an advertisement in Il Carroccio, 2.10 (November 1915), IV.
22. "The Emporium Press (Francesco Tocci)" was listed in 1901, and still listed in 1910, in The Trow Copartnership and Corporation Directory for the Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, at 209 Grand Street in the earlier edition and at 520 Broadway in the later one.
23. According to Gli italiani di New York: versione italiana, riveduta ed ampliata da Alberto Cupelli, "a cura degli scrittori del Federal Writers' Project della Work Projects Administration di New York City" (New York: Labor Press, 1939), 87.
24. See, later, discussion in a 1953 story in the magazine Divagando by Italo Stanco.
25. See Vecoli,"The Italian Immigrant Press."
26. Pozzetta, "The Italian Immigrant Press of New York City," 32.
27. Private conversation (2012) with Ernie Rossi, grandson of the founder of Rossi & Co. books.
28. The most thorough treatment of such manuals or" secretaries," placing the origins of such works firmly in Italy, is Mary Anne Trasciatti, "Letter Writing in an Italian Immigrant Community: A Transatlantic Tradition," Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 39.1 (January 2009), 73-94.
29. Examples include Antonio De Martino, Segretario amoroso: italiano-inglese (New York: Italian Book Co., 1945); and De Martino (with Violetta Sironi), Segretario speciale per la corrispondenza delle madri, spose, fidanzati con i figli, mariti, fidanzati in italiano (New York: Italian Book Company, [1945?]).
30. Alberto Pecorini, Grammatica-enciclopedia italiana-inglese per gli italiani degli Stati Uniti (New York: Nicoletti Bros., 1911).
31. Gli americani nella vita moderna osservati da un italiano (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1909), 397-398.
32. Pecorini, Grammatica-enciclopedia,"Preface."
33. The Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, contains about 150- 200 pages of records of the IBC.
34. I thank G. Scott Clemons, a major collector of the great Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius (1449-1515), for this insight into how Aldus, by publishing grammars and dictionaries in ancient Greek, which was nearly a lost language at that time, created a marketplace for the Greek playwrights and other writers he published.
35. Pecorini, Grammatica-enciclopedia, "Preface."
36. As of 1906, there were at least a half-dozen others besides De Gaudenzi, the Tocci's and De Martino, consistent with the newspaper account of the same time discussed earlier.
37. There were about twenty other book publishers at this same time.
38. See L'Eco d'Italia (9 January 1862), cited in Pietro Russo, "La stampa periodica italo-americana", in Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti. L'emigrazione e l'opera degli italiani negli Stati Uniti d'America (Florence: Istituto di studi americani, 1972), 493- 546. Russo also cites an Almanacco della Pace, Almanacco enciclopedico Italo Americano, Almanacco per l'anno, Il vero Barbanera contenene le principali leggi e informazioni utili agli italiani stabiliti in America, all edited in New York. Russo, "La Stampa," 536 n. 94.
39. For a thorough explanation of this background, as well as an analytic tour de force on the several layers of functioning of this directory, see Robert Viscusi, "The Universal Exposition," in Periconi, Strangers, 30-41, and this website.
40. As late as 1949, the IBC held copyright on over 1,000 Italian songs, and threatened to sue foreign language radio broadcasters that refused to pay IBC a licensing fee for every song played: The Billboard (9 July 1949), 16.
41. See the works cited in note 29 above; and Antonio De Martino, Tripoli italiana: la guerra italo-turca (New York: Italian Book Company, 1911); De Martino, L'assassinio della Contessa Trigona (New York: Italian Book Company, 1919, 1941); De Martino, Collection of Italian and Neapolitan Songs (New York: Italian Book Company, 1934); De Martino, Libra del sapere (New York: Italian Book Company, 1941); and De Martino and Umberto Fragasso, Il libro delle erbe: medicinali e magiche (New York: Italian Book Company, 1946).
42. This is the slightly fictionalized story of the famous murder of the Contessa Trigona by her lover when she ended their love affair, an event that marked the beginning of the decline of the Sicilian nobility.
43. Durante, Italoamericana [American ed.], 145-182; Marazzi, A occhi aperti, 52- 65; and see Rose Basile Green, The ltalian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures (Cranbury: Associated University Presses,1974), 64-65; and Alfredo Bosi, Cinquant'anni di vita italiana in America (New York: Bagnasco Press, 1921), 408.
44. Benedicte Deschamps, "La letteratura d'appendice nei periodici italo-americani (1910-1935)" in Il sogno italo-americano: realtà e immaginario dell'emigrazione negli Stati Uniti, ed. Sebastiano Martelli. Acts of the Conference of the Istituto "Suor Orsola Benincasa," Naples, 28-30 November 1996 (Naples: Cuen, 1998), 279-294.
45. Marazzi, A occhi aperti, passim.
46. Works Progress Administration, The Italians of New York: A Survey Prepared by the Workers of the Federal Writers' Project (New York: Random House, 1938), 132.
47. Gli Italiani di New York, 87. The Italian edition is cited fully at note 23.
48. Divagando (16 September 1953), 26.
49. Il Progresso Italo-Americano (10 February 1956), 7.
50. While the imported books were mostly published in Italian, the IBC also published a very small number of English-language translations, such as Maria Gentile, The Italian Cook Book: The Art of Eating Well (New York: Italian Book Company, 1919); and Benito Mussolini, John Huss the Veracious (New York: Italian Book Company, 1939).
51. See note 33 and discussion in text.
52. Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti d'America, 452.
53. Ibid. In this latter regard Tocci published and sold Arbib-Costa's Italian-language instruction books, which appear to be designed mostly for non-Italians, each of which works went through many editions in the decades they were published by the IBC. In addition to the previously noted Italian Lessons, Arbib-Costa's Advanced Italian Lessons (NewYork: Italian Book Company, 1912 [1st ed.]) appears to have also sold well in its 1914 [2nd] and 1924 [3rd] editions.