Manuel Grillo: “Rediscovering great authors is like cultivating ancient grains”

A patrol of friends gathered around the bet that publishing is not such a crazy enterprise, or that it is at least prosecutable madness. Lawyers, architects, business executives convinced that the “difficult” book, by great foreign authors beyond the mainstream and consumer literature, can find acclaim from critics and readers, even making ends meet. This is how the Settecolori publishing house was born, born in the seventies by the will of Pino Grillo and his death inherited in 2000 by his son Manuel, whose visiting card is quite composite: Calabrian who completed his scientific training in Strasbourg, an expert in ancient grains, owner of an agritourism between Capo Vaticano and Vibo Valentia but grew up in the midst of drafts and writers, reading French authors while raising Sila sheepdogs and learning how to produce bronze-drawn pasta between a book fair and a literary conference. He is the managing director of Settecolori, revived thanks to the professionals who are passionate about it, with an activity of 25 titles published so far in two and a half years.

A scouting among unknown authors in Italy? Deep fishing among the works of big names that have escaped the network of big publishers?

Settecolori is the result of a passion for books “that must be published”. The example I am most fond of is “I due stendardi” by Lucien Rebatet, a secret masterpiece of French literature which according to George Steiner is superior to the novels of Céline. It was published by Gallimard in 1951/52 on the advice of Camus and translating it into Italian was always a dream of my father and Stenio Solinas. Last year we succeeded and in six months we sold out the first edition of two thousand copies, quite a few for a work of 1,300 pages that requires demanding reading. “The Two Standards” took off thanks to rave reviews and word of mouth, so we’ll be reprinting it in February. On the band is reported what Mitterrand said: “Humanity is divided into two camps. Those who have read ‘The Two Standards’ and the others”.

Another literary case was Maurizio Serra with “Fratelli Separata”, first published by Settecolori in 2007 and republished in ’21, on the intertwined and contrasting events of Drieu La Rochelle, Aragon and Malraux.

It is the only book written by Serra in Italian and not in French. It was we who sold the translation rights to Gallimard. Meanwhile Serra, who won the Prix Goncourt with the biography of Malaparte, was the first Italian to become a member of the Academie Française in 2019.

Then two books by the Adelphian Peter Hopkirk and a classic such as Peter Fleming’s Bayonets in Lhasa, a life of Lawrence of Arabia written by Victoria Ocampo, Peter Handke’s diaries but in special editions with numbered editions. Don’t you risk snobbery?

On the contrary, we carve out an identity in the vast sea of ​​publishing, because the choice of authors must be accompanied by the care of the book as an object of almost sensory beauty: sewn brochures, edition papers, covers with simple but recognizable graphics and cable ties that can be collected. An idea appreciated by both readers and booksellers.

Not even in your sector is the economy very happy for 2023. What are your fears?

Anyone aiming for a top-level offer must be optimistic. We restarted Settecolori on May 13, 2020, in full confinement due to the pandemic, yet we have shown that there is room for quality and it does not lack an audience. We will continue on the line of significant but unpublished texts in Italy, with the satisfaction of having made known, for example, “Il numero 31328” by Ilias Venezis, which recounts the Greek genocide by the Turks on the centenary of the tragedy. Eighteen out of twenty thousand prisoners survived after marching naked for hundreds of kilometres: the “final solution” was applied to the route, not to the destination. We sold out of two editions in a few months. Or “Hope against hope”, first volume of the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelshtam on the atrocities of the Stalinist dictatorship, a testimony judged superior to that of Solgenitsin, translated in the United States in the 1960s but unknown in Italy in its complete version, of which we will publish the second volume in the spring.

Any other upcoming titles?

“No me esperen en abril”, “Don’t wait for me in April” by Bryce Echenique, an important work by the Peruvian writer unpublished in Italy. and “On the Seas of Lord Jim. A journey into the heart of Conrad “by the English journalist Gavin Young with a preface by Edward Said, which is a journey on the routes of the great writer.

What do books have to do with the cultivation of ancient grains?

The value of certain literary works is comparable to that of rosìa, the variety of wheat already documented in the Aragonese era but probably even more ancient. And then there is the romantic curiosity of a boy who loved Salgari growing up in the circle of his father’s friends, who were all young men in search of their own destiny at the time.

What did your father teach you as a publisher?

Judging a work by its absolute value, which always goes beyond ideological passions. Although he himself was animated by it, he had already overcome the easy right-left dichotomy.