The beautiful, rare little books by Vincenzo Campo, a Milanese publisher

The first rule lays down two prohibitions: no typos and no debts. “It’s best to steer clear of both, especially if you want to be a publisher,” assures Vincenzo Campo, seated at the glass-topped table at Henry Beyle, the publishing house with which he has been publishing small books in Milan for seventeen years, printed on fine paper with a level of typographical care that is now rare. Campo knows only too well how costly a typographical error can be: once, because of a grave accent instead of an acute one, he had an entire print run of pocket-sized books pulped. “They were made of cotton paper; we spent a fortune,” he recalls, touching his fingertips as if they were still burning. Was it worth it? “When it comes to typos, I side with Gesualdo Bufalino, for whom they are the devil’s ink, rather than with Alberto Savinio, who found unexpected intelligence in the errors of his typewriter. At a certain point, however, you have to give in, accept that the final proofreader is the reader,” he says, and stands up to fetch one of his early books, Vari tipi di editore by Valentino Bompiani: “Here I was forced to slip in a slip with the corrections.”

Over the years, its catalogue has come to include some of the greatest names of 20th-century Italian literature: Buzzati, Flaiano, Gadda, Pontiggia, Sciascia. Unpublished or rare works, almost all 20th-century classics, almost all now deceased, as Campo would remind aspiring authors who thrust a manuscript under his nose, hastening to add: “That’s why it’s not in your best interests to publish with us.” “Deceased writers are the painkiller of the publishing world. The text is what it is; the author has given it the green light; you mustn’t argue. And in publishing, you can do anything except argue with a stranger.” Then came forays into the present: Renata Colorni, Tullio Pericoli, Ferdinando Scianna. “Names who would be spoilt for choice when it comes to where to publish. A friendship centred on books developed with them: there, you really can have a dialogue – and even disagree – without bitterness, whilst listening.” A bond that cannot be measured by words alone. “All three have shown unrivalled generosity, without ever making a fuss about the lost earnings from this collaboration.”

With some readers, however, there have been a few misunderstandings, particularly regarding unread books, where the pages need to be opened with a letter opener. “Even today, there are those who write to us to complain that the book is faulty; we have prepared a letter to explain that those bound-together pages are not a defect. Moreover, they serve to synchronise one’s own breathing and pace with that of the reading.”

Over the years, however, Campo has become not only a refined publisher but also a highly skilled salesman. He can almost always be found at major book fairs, and sometimes at the book market in Piazza Diaz, Milan, showcasing his wares, whilst reserving a few sharp, provocative remarks for the more hesitant. Some people get angry, but most just smile: “It’s a performance where you have to win the applause,” he says modestly. But the act also brings some unease: “A mask, however philosophical, is always a symbol of hypocrisy. That’s why,” he admits, “I feel a twinge of shame in hindsight.” His father was also a trader, in Giuliana, in the hilly hinterland of Palermo where he was born. “He was a small-scale trader, dealing mainly in wheat in his later years.” There were no books at home; only the Giornale di Sicilia was delivered. How does such a strong passion for something one does not possess come about? “As in love stories, I believe it was absence – a notable form of denial – that created the desire.” My earliest memory of books is linked precisely to my father’s work: “One morning, when I was very young, I accompanied him to a deconsecrated church where wheat had been piled up; inside a small display cabinet, I saw four or five shelves full of books. For years I’ve tried to piece together what they were, but I’ve never managed it. Perhaps Henry Beyle is nothing more than an attempt to reconstruct the contents of that small, abandoned cabinet”.

His father would have liked him to become a lawyer; he, however, with a degree in philosophy, went to Milan to work with books. The ‘astratti furori’ of Vittorino’s memory soon cooled: he took his CV to Bompiani, where a box at the entrance collected such applications. “I asked the doorman, a Sicilian like me, if I could leave it there. And he, perhaps taken by the rapport born of our shared dialectal accent, looked at me and said: ‘Just forget it’”. So he began teaching and entered the publishing world through the back door: school textbooks, “which in the 1980s,” he points out, “were a very vibrant sector”. He started out at Morano, the historic Neapolitan publisher that was the first to publish De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana. Then, in 1996, he approached Elvira Sellerio with a proposal to make some titles from the island’s best-known series, La Memoria, available to schools, without, however, turning them into textbooks. “I owe much of what I know about publishing to her, for the things she conveyed without actually saying them. She was one and the same with the subject matter of the books.”

His publishing house, on the other hand, was founded on St Joseph’s Day in 2009. The tribute is to Stendhal, but with one distinction: the charming man from Grenoble was actually registered at birth as Marie-Henri Beyle, with an ‘i’; the ‘y’, however, comes from The Life of Henry Brulard, which many Stendhal scholars consider his true masterpiece. “Throughout his life, Stendhal sought pseudonyms behind which to hide. We have done the opposite, using his real name to conceal others: Henry Beyle is a façade, a hiding place.” What does the future hold for the publishing house? “To stay in good health, and above all to survive,” he smiles. To achieve this, he quotes Bernard Grasset, the great French publisher, who kept a sign in his study reading: ‘Don’t forget to learn to say no.’ “This is the banner of freedom, especially in publishing. Because, if you know how to say no, you can access almost anything.”

Filippo Maria Battaglia