Publishing

The strictly publishing season begins in 1959: after leaving RAI, Umberto Eco joins Bompiani as an editorial executive. Fittingly, the first project he works on is an encyclopedia—the Illustrated History of Inventions, prepared together with his future wife Renate Ramge: the encyclopedic device will remain his natural habitat, before theory and long before narrative.

It was, in truth, Italo Calvino—who had considered publishing Open Work as a single essay at Einaudi—who first grasped the theoretical strength and editorial potential of Eco's work. But in the meantime Valentino Bompiani wants him inside the editorial staff of the via Pisacane publishing house in Milan, integrating him into the machine of the firm. Around him move Enzo Paci, Paolo De Benedetti, Elio Vittorini, Giovanni Battista Zorzoli, Andrea Bonomi and Vittorio Di Giuro, who would later support The Name of the Rose and introduce the novelist Eco to the attention of Valentino Bompiani.

Eco's work focuses in particular on the philosophical series Idee Nuove, a series he inherits from Paci and which, before that, had its roots in the philosophical tradition of Antonio Banfi. Between the late 1960s and early 1970s the catalogue acquires McLuhan, Barthes, Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss and Goodman, bringing with them the full horizon of contemporary human sciences.

Within this framework take shape sections dedicated to philosophy of language, formal logic, structural linguistics and the sociology of communication, expanding the field from philosophical thought to media theory and the sciences of signs. Here contemporary human sciences arrive in full: phenomenology, philosophy of language, semiotics, linguistics, logic and sociology.

It is within this context that The Semiotic Field is launched, a series directly tied to Eco's name, introducing not only the classics of the discipline—translated and made available to the Italian public—but also the works of his academic students, among them Daniele Barbieri, Giovanna Cosenza, Anna Maria Lorusso, Costantino Marmo, Siri Nergaard, Claudio Paolucci, Maria Pia Pozzato, Isabella Pezzini, Valentina Pisanty, Patrizia Violi and Ugo Volli. It functions as a genuine editorial laboratory of semiotics, where the catalogue does not merely reflect a discipline but materially contributes to building it.

Eco, however, is also the author of continuous incursions into all areas of the publishing house, and particularly into fiction. The editorial office is a porous organism, and Eco moves fluidly across departments, eventually inventing series such as Amletica leggera (Mafalda comics, early works by Woody Allen), where editorial lightness becomes a tool for analysing domestic cultural habits. It is no coincidence that an editorial office—the fictional Garamond—is at the centre of the plot of one of his finest novels, Foucault's Pendulum, entirely orchestrated around the certainties of knowledge sources.

It is equally significant that his theoretical essays—faithful to the editorial tradition that discourages series editors from publishing within their own imprints—do not appear in the series he directs but in Bompiani's Studi di critica letteraria, where they occupy a distinct space while remaining within the same house. Eco, as an author, will always remain loyal to Bompiani, with few exceptions: the entries for the Enciclopedia Einaudi, the volume Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Einaudi), and later The Search for the Perfect Language and The Philosophy and Its Histories (Laterza).

Alongside essays, fiction and general nonfiction, Eco never abandons the encyclopedic model. From the outset of his intellectual adventure he contributes aesthetics entries to the Grande Enciclopedia Marzorati; he works on lemmas and structure for the Enciclopedia Einaudi. Beyond the History of Inventions, he publishes How to Write a Thesis in the Bompiani Manuals series, a text that introduces generations of students to research practices and source citation—archiving, referencing, citing with awareness. The philosophy textbooks published by Laterza perform the same work of orientation among sources and certified knowledge.

In the 1990s and 2000s Eco transfers this logic to digital media. With Olivetti he experiments with the CD-ROM as a navigable form; with Danco Singer and the Gruppo Espresso he launches Encyclomedia; the History of European Civilization (2000–2015) is its print version. It is the same workshop, with new tools.

Equally new are hybrid narrative and editorial instruments shaped, for example, by his enduring passion for comics: from American and Argentine classics to the founding of Linus in 1965—with the poetry of the Peanuts strips and with Giovanni and Annamaria Gandini, Elio Vittorini, Oreste del Buono, Franco Cavallone and Salvatore Gregorietti—all the way to Corto Maltese, Dylan Dog and the novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which intertwines text and images. Comics accompany Eco's intellectual and professional trajectory throughout.

The final innovative editorial gesture is the return to vegetal memory in the digital era. It is 2015: the founding of the publishing house La nave di Teseo with Jean Claude Fasquelle, Elisabetta Sgarbi, Mario Andreose, Furio Colombo and others, aimed at rescuing Bompiani's legacy from absorption into other publishing brands. It is not an act of nostalgia but one of coherence. La nave di Teseo continues its work to this day.

For Eco, publishing is at once art and craft, a bricolage of knowledge in the noble sense given by Lévi-Strauss: arranging what exists in order to make exist what does not yet. A work that brings together technology—from encyclopedic volumes to CD-ROMs to digital infrastructures—and a passion for the book-object, culminating in bibliophilia and in his extraordinary collection of ancient volumes. It is the Semiological Library: curious, eccentric, magical and pneumatic, today housed at the National Braidense Library in the Eco Room and open to all—not a mausoleum, but the public continuation of his editorial workshop.