The following speech was given by Luis Schwarcz upon receiving the Cesare De Michelis International Award for Publishing at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
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Dear Lili, Julia and Zizi, who represent my family here, and dear colleagues and friends, who represent my publishing world, as if they were my second family. Thank you all for taking time out of your busy routines to be here. My colleagues at Companhia das Letras deserve all the thanks, since this award is for them too.
I have no other way to begin this speech than by telling you of my surprise when I received an email from Francesca Varotto, the publisher of Marsilio, and a member of the jury for the Cesare De Michelis Prize, telling me that I’d been granted such a great distinction. A surprise that here becomes joy and gratitude. Gratitude to Luca De Michelis, son of Cesare De Michelis, and all the De Michelis family. They created the prize as a way to recognize the work of publishers and to honor the memory of their father, a storied publisher who deserves every accolade.
To the jury, who, in a moment of distraction, chose me as the laureate, I offer you my most heartfelt thanks.
I would also like to thank Mr. Juergen Boos, president of the Frankfurt Book Fair, who joined forces with the prize, bringing its announcement to the most important occasion for publishing professionals.
Let me continue with an interesting event. It involves one of the winners who precedes me, my friend Michael Krüger, here today, who was awarded the prize two years ago. Michael has always been a role model and example for me.
One year, long enough ago that I no longer remember the date, Michael organized a conference on publishing in Berlin. Another good friend, Carol Brown Janeway—who, sadly, is no longer with us—was tasked with coordinating a debate on literary publishing. The writer and publisher, the late Roberto Calasso and I were invited to be on the panel.
I had no idea what my fellow panelist was going to present. Nor did he know what I had prepared. In the end, what we said could not have been more contradictory.
Calasso told the story of two historical publishers: Kurt Wolff, born in Leipzig, and Aldo Manuzio, who, as it happens, was from Bassiano but settled in Venice, the city this award is from. His work dates from the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century.
My fellow panellist explained that Manuzio pioneered the book as we know it today. He created a new format for publishing, allowing books to be portable—a kind of precursor to what would become our paperbacks.
He is also said to have invented italics, among other typographical innovations. He commissioned translations of numerous Greek texts and published great Italian classics. The book in its modern format leaves us eternally indebted to Manuzio.
We are also the first people responsible for the integrity of a book. Integrity has two meanings in Portuguese. In English too. It means that something is complete, or whole, and at the same time that it is upright and honest.The other professional cited was Kurt Wolff, an expressionist publisher, as many refer to him, who created a publishing house so special and sophisticated that it would be difficult to compare it to any other of his time, or even to those of times to come. In his own way, he also invented literary publishing. His influence changed what we know as publishing to this day. He and his publishing house were so intertwined that it was as if they were one and the same: a publishing house who was a person, or a person who was a publishing house? Wolf had extremely good taste and the keenest cultural awareness. We all know how important he was in publishing Franz Kafka’s works for the first time.
Using these two examples, Calasso argued in his talk that publishing is an art, implying, in my interpretation, that he himself followed this path. The text he read was very well written, brilliant.
My explanation couldn’t have been more different. It was simple in style and as a literary narrative. It sought to explain why publishing is not an art, and why this term should be reserved only for the work of writers, to whom we dedicate our lives. Publishing books can be summarized, in broad strokes, as uninterrupted acts of dedication, dedication to writers and readers.
I wasn’t able to find my old speech before I prepared this one, so I don’t know how I managed to use Ivan Nabokov’s lectures on literature and a few poems by Fernando Pessoa to defend my point of view. I was no doubt trying to lend some polish to the simple idea I had taken with me to Berlin, never suspecting that a friendly dispute awaited me there.
I remembered that morning in Berlin as I was writing these lines, to say that, although the style was rough, I still believe I was right. Publishing is not an art but devotion. And devotion in the literary sense, not the religious.
By this I don’t mean to say that the publishers cited by Calasso, and Calasso himself, and those who preceded me in receiving this honor shouldn’t be seen as exceptions to the rule, but they are, as always, exceptions that prove the rule. There are artists working in publishing, but publishing in itself is not an art. I am also certain that the colleagues who will succeed me in this honor will possibly prove, once again, that there are singular cases that my view hasn’t taken into account, that is, they will disagree with me, or prove me wrong, even before they are chosen. As such, in receiving this prize, my role shall be that of a bridge between these few artist publishers—including Cesare De Michelis—and the thousands of publishers that I call us. In this role, as a bridging editor, I represent in this pulpit the women and men who dedicate their lives to the artistry of writers and the imagination of readers.
We are the first readers of an enormous quantity of emotions and vulnerabilities that accumulate in the time it takes to write a text. Before that, what the writer saw in front of him or her was an empty screen or a blank page. When we begin our work, we return to that moment, to the silence that precedes writing, a silence that will mark the creation of a narrative for many months or years. Our profession is based on understanding this inaugural silence.
The great thinker Carlo Ginzburg, son of the writer Natalia Ginzburg, when trying to give meaning to the work of historians, chose three different masters from other professions as examples to be followed. According to Ginzburg, historians should rely on an evidentiary method, that is, make their profession a search for clues and traces as did, each in his own way, the great 19th-century art expert Giovanni Morelli, Sigmund Freud, and Sherlock Holmes.
The method proposed by the historian serves publishers and editors perfectly; they must begin with the tiniest details of the text during the reading and making of a book in order to arrive at the essence, the whole.Morelli was constantly called upon by museums to verify the authenticity of paintings. He said that Da Vinci’s smiles or Perugino’s skies were of little use in his work. To determine whether a painting was fake or real, the expert had to look to the details, the hands and feet, fingers and folds of dresses. That’s why he catalogued the different types of earlobes in Botticelli’s paintings. For him, detail is much more difficult to plagiarize than the most characteristic features of a work of art.
When creating psychoanalytic theory, Freud—a reader of Morelli—focused on symptoms to unravel mental illnesses or to delve deeper into the souls of men and women.
Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s beloved son, also solved mysteries through detail. For him, a dead man’s ear could be much more useful than trying to find the motive for a crime. Ears mark family ancestry more than coats of arms. He solved one of his famous crimes only because ear shapes are strongly hereditary.
I say this because in my opinion the method proposed by the historian serves publishers and editors perfectly; they must begin with the tiniest details of the text during the reading and making of a book in order to arrive at the essence, the whole.
We are also the first people responsible for the integrity of a book. Integrity has two meanings in Portuguese. In English too. It means that something is complete, or whole, and at the same time that it is upright and honest. A narrative written over many months or years needs someone to read it in the present to feel whether time has affected it positively or negatively, whether everything that needed to be said is there, and whether the result honors the dignity of literature and the spirit of a work of art.
“God is in the details” is a phrase we are all too familiar with, attributed to the great art critic Aby Warburg and also to the Anglo-German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Although one specializes in art and the other in architecture, I am sure that the statement could have been coined by a writer or publisher or attributed to the literary work that defines our lives: God is in the details!
If we were to change the phrase a little to “God is in what is singular” or “God is in what is unique,” the statement would apply only to artists, writers included. So, while we hunt for the details that lead us to the whole, writers, in addition to this, are forever seeking new narratives and ways of thinking that step out of the ordinary, creating language that is truly original.
This is not to say that our mission is merely to tend to minor aspects of the text, but that it is through them that we arrive at the essence of literature, the heart of a novel, short story or poem. Based on simple suggestions that I have given authors, some of them have only had a few extra hours of work. One rewrote his book over a period of nine years!
Editors and publishers are above all the first readers of a literary text, the ones who work to ensure that the future dialogue between writer and reader flows smoothly.But there are more than just details in our lives. In addition to these, we publishers must know how to work with something fundamental to literature: the wait. It is found in books, created by writers, who manipulate time, opening paragraphs as if they were windows, only to close them later, or even leave them open forever, rewarding readers with the suspension of real time and the delight of the wait. And the wait is today a political asset, a rare commodity, in a world of radicalism, of hasty ideas and solutions. In general, we don’t wait for bad news or tragedies, or even for the instant aggression of social media. It shows up, unwelcome.
That is why those who wait have a kind of optimism, of faith. Literature is, therefore, an exercise in waiting, created by writers, for the suspension of the present during the act of reading, for a silent utopia, where nothing happens but pure imagination.
I have titled a book I am writing about my profession The First Reader. In it, as here, I argue that we, editors and publishers, are above all the first readers of a literary text, the ones who work to ensure that the future dialogue between writer and reader flows smoothly.
When I mentioned the title of my possible book to a colleague, he asked me, “Are you paying homage to Ricardo Piglia?”
I had completely forgotten about one of the books I am most proud of having published, called The Last Reader. In it, Piglia—one of the most important Argentinean writers of all time and a great friend—tells stories about writers as readers. The denomination “The Last Reader” appears, among other things, to refer to Jorge Luis Borges, who tried to read when he was already blind, staring hard at the pages, pushing his head towards the book, touching his nose on the paper.
It also harks back to the famous photo of Che Guevara reading a book in a tree during a guerrilla war, suspending the time of an armed conflict in order to read. This same guerrilla would later be shot dead in a classroom, on whose blackboard were the words “I can read.”
The last example I borrow from Piglia’s book is that of Don Quixote, an avid reader who collected scraps of paper he found on the ground along his way to make one last book. Quixote read and experienced everything. He never read, however, chivalric romances, a genre in which he is a character. With one exception: a novel about a false Quixote.
I shall end by reminding you that the profiles of these last readers, Borges, Quixote and Che Guevara, created by a magnificent writer, give an epic dimension to the act of reading. The last reader is a hero. The first reader, on the other hand, is just a simple man.
Thank you very much.
