Charms, affection and feats of Giulio Einaudi, prince of publishers

Roberto Cazzola reconstructs the histrionic figure of the Piedmontese, in an intense and cultured memoir published by Edizioni Seb27. A sometimes nostalgic tale that restores the talent of a complex, contradictory and brilliant man

Already in the very first lines of the preface to his intense and cultured memoir, A quarter of a pear by Giulio Einaudi (Seb27 Editions), Roberto Cazzola makes the terms in question very clear: “I loved Giulio Einaudi with a hilarious and filial love”. More than twenty years after his death, Giulio Einaudi remains an inexhaustible and foundational figure for anyone who has had anything to do with the great Piedmontese publisher. A father, indeed, but at the same time a son, a man with a complex character, shy and cheeky, taciturn and worldly, rational and instinctive at the same time. A man not at all accustomed to conformism and who despite the criticisms – even harsh ones, received in the 1980s, when the economic crisis of the publishing house became apparent – remains an incomparable reference in publishing. A fully twentieth-century man that the book by Cazzola, Germanist and Einaudi editor for twenty years, tells with amiable nostalgia. An affectionate story in which there is no shortage of the famous quirks, even hateful, but also the sudden affectionateness of a man who, despite surrounding himself with a formidable crowd, always seemed to stand out in a separate place.