Libreria S.F. Vanni: - ultima novità e ristampe - supplemento al catalogo generale della Libreria S.F. Vanni [S. F. Vanni Bookstore: latest news and reprints- supplement to the general catalogue of the S.F. Vanni Bookstore]. New York: Libreria S.F. Vanni, 1924.
Title
Libreria S.F. Vanni: - ultima novità e ristampe - supplemento al catalogo generale della Libreria S.F. Vanni [S. F. Vanni Bookstore: latest news and reprints- supplement to the general catalogue of the S.F. Vanni Bookstore]. New York: Libreria S.F. Vanni, 1924.
Description
Vanni's was the longest standing fixture of Italian books in New York, whether at 528 West Broadway (in the early 20th c., when it distributed and then published an American edition of L'Asino, q.v.), or at 509 West Broadway (at the time of publication of this catalogue), or, in my lifetime, on West 12th Street. The store is no more.
Vanni's was an incomplete blessing for Italians in America; marvelous in its importation of a wide variety of Italian books for sale to Americans of all types, not just Italians. But incomplete, because it did not carry Italian-language books written, published and printed in the U.S., thus unlike either the Italian Book Company, in Little Italy, which both published its own work and sold in addition the works of many other publishers' Italian language books, imported or home-grown, in all fields and mostly non-political, or, for socialist, anarchist or other radical literature, Tresca's Libreria Rossa or Elvira Catello's La Libreria Elvira Catello in Manhattan, or the Libreria Sociologica in Paterson, NJ.
So in the pages of this 34-page catalogue, you will find Dante, Alfieri, Croce, D'Annunzio, De Roberto, Marinetti and Boccaccio, and also non-Italians like Baudelaire, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Defoe, Dumas, Oscar Wilde, and Tolstoy, but translated into Italian. You will not find any works of the immensely popular (to American Italians) Ciambelli or Cordiferro or Giovannitti (even though Vanni's carried the somewhat shlocky popular romances of Italian Carolina Invernizio, in a full page ad for two dozen of her novels) nor any of the works of the "librerie rosse," those bookstores stocked with socialist and anarchist works. A full line of the Milanese publishers Hoepli and Salani can be found as well.
Vanni's was an incomplete blessing for Italians in America; marvelous in its importation of a wide variety of Italian books for sale to Americans of all types, not just Italians. But incomplete, because it did not carry Italian-language books written, published and printed in the U.S., thus unlike either the Italian Book Company, in Little Italy, which both published its own work and sold in addition the works of many other publishers' Italian language books, imported or home-grown, in all fields and mostly non-political, or, for socialist, anarchist or other radical literature, Tresca's Libreria Rossa or Elvira Catello's La Libreria Elvira Catello in Manhattan, or the Libreria Sociologica in Paterson, NJ.
So in the pages of this 34-page catalogue, you will find Dante, Alfieri, Croce, D'Annunzio, De Roberto, Marinetti and Boccaccio, and also non-Italians like Baudelaire, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Defoe, Dumas, Oscar Wilde, and Tolstoy, but translated into Italian. You will not find any works of the immensely popular (to American Italians) Ciambelli or Cordiferro or Giovannitti (even though Vanni's carried the somewhat shlocky popular romances of Italian Carolina Invernizio, in a full page ad for two dozen of her novels) nor any of the works of the "librerie rosse," those bookstores stocked with socialist and anarchist works. A full line of the Milanese publishers Hoepli and Salani can be found as well.
Citation
“Libreria S.F. Vanni: - ultima novità e ristampe - supplemento al catalogo generale della Libreria S.F. Vanni [S. F. Vanni Bookstore: latest news and reprints- supplement to the general catalogue of the S.F. Vanni Bookstore]. New York: Libreria S.F. Vanni, 1924.,” Italian-Language American Imprints: The Periconi Collection, accessed January 18, 2026, https://italianamericanimprints.omeka.net/items/show/631.
Comments