dollars a copy, and maybe a few libraries will actually buy it.

Bottom line: If we take the plunge, we’re getting ourselves into an endless legal hassle, the book will be impounded, but not like one of those sex books, which they then sell under the counter. This one will just be seized and forgotten. Maybe ten years from now Oxford will buy it for The World’s Classics, but in the meantime you’ll have spent your money, and it’ll be a long wait before you see any of it again.

I’m really sorry, because the book’s not bad. But we’re publishers, not detectives. So I’d say pass.
Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy Alighieri is your typical Sunday writer. (In everyday life he’s an active member of the pharmacists’ guild.) Still, his work shows an undeniable grasp of technique and considerable narrative flair. The book, in the Florentine dialect, consists of about a hundred rhymed chapters, and much of it is interesting and readable. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of astronomy and certain concise, provocative theo­logical notions.

The third part of the book is the best and will have the widest appeal; it involves subjects of general interest, concerns of the common readerSalvation, the Beatific Vision, prayers to the Virgin. But the first part is obscure and self-indulgent, with passages of cheap eroticism, violence, and downright crudity. This is a big problem: I don’t see how the reader will get past this first «canticle,» which doesn’t really add much to what has already been written about the next world in any number of moral tracts and treatises, not to mention the Golden Legend of J acopo da Varagine.

But the greatest drawback is the author’s choice of his local dialect (inspired no doubt by some crack­pot avantgarde idea). We all know that today’s Latin needs a shot in the arm-it isn’t just the little literary cliques that insist on this. But there’s a limit, after all, if not in the rules of language then at least to the public’s ability to understand. We have seen what happened with the so-called Sicilian poets: their pub­lisher went around on bicycle distributing the books among the various outlets, but the works ended up on the remainders counter anyway.

Further, if we publish a long poem in Florentine, we’ll have to publish another in Milanese and <l:nother in Paduan: otherwise we lose our grip on the market. This is a job for small presses, chapbooks, etc. Personally I have nothing against rhyme, but quantitative metrics are still the most popular form with poetry readers, and I doubt that a normal reader could stomach this endless sequence of tercets, es­pecially if he comes from Bologna, say, or Venice. So I think we’d do better to launch a series of really popular titles at reasonable prices: the works of Gildas or Anselm of Aosta, for example. And leave to the little avant-garde magazines the numbered editions on handmade paper. «For there neid faere, naenig uuirthit . . . » The linguistic hash of the postmoderns.

Tasso, Torquato, Jerusalem Liberated As a «modern» epic of chivalry, this isn’t bad. It’s written gracefully, and the situations are fairly fresh:

high time poets stopped imitating the Breton or Carolingian cycles. But let’s face it, the story is about the Crusaders and the taking of Jerusalem, a religious subject. We can’t expect to sell such a book to the younger generation of «angries.» At best we’ll get good reviews in Our Sunday Visitor or maybe The Tablet. Even there, I have doubts about the reception of certain erotic scenes that are a bit too lewd. So my vote would be «yes,» provided the author revises the work, turning it into something even nuns could read. I’ve already mentioned this to him, and he didn’t balk at the idea of such a rewrite.

Diderot, Denis, Les bijoux indiscrets and La Moine I confess I haven’t unwrapped these two manuscripts, but I believe a reader should sense immedi­ately what’s worth devoting time to and what isn’t. I know this Diderot; he makes encyclopedias (he once did some proofreading for us), and he’s involved in some dreary enterprise in God knows how many volumes which will probably never see the light of day. He goes around looking for draftsmen to draw the works of a clock for him or the threads of a Gobelin tapestry, and he’ll surely bankrupt his publisher. The man’s a snail, and I don’t really think he’s capable of writing anything amusing in the fic­tion field, especially for a series like ours, which has some juicy, spicy little things like Restif de la Bre­tonne. As the old saying goes, he should stick to his last.

Sade, D. A. Frarn;ois, Justine

The manuscript was in a whole pile of things I had to look at this week and, to be honest, I haven’t read it through. I opened it at random three times, in three different places, which, as you know, is enough for a trained eye.

Well, the first time I found an avalanche of words, page after page, about the philosophy of nature, with digressions on the cruelty of the struggle for survival, the reproduction of plants, and the cycles of animal species. The second time: at least fifteen pages on the concept of pleasure, the senses and the imagination, and so on. The third time: twenty pages on the question of submission between men and women in various countries of the world . . . I think that’s enough. We’re not looking for a work of philosophy. Today’s audience wants sex, sex, and more sex. In every shape and form. The line we should follow is Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas. Let’s leave the highbrow stuff to Indiana.

Cervantes, Miguel, Don Quixote

The book-the readable parts of it, anywaytells the story of a Spanish gentleman and his manservant who roam the world pursuing chivalrous dreams. This Don Quixote is half crazy (the character is fully developed, and Cervantes knows how to spin a tale). The servant is a simpleton endowed with some rough common sense, and the reader identifies with him as he tries to deflate his master’s fantasies.

So much for the story, which has some good dramatic twists and a number of amusing and meaty scenes. My objection is not based on my personal response to the book.
In our successful low-price series, «The Facts of Life,» we have published, with admirable results, Amadis of Gaul, The Legend of the Graaf, The Romance of Tristan, The Lay of the Little Bird, The Tale of Troy, and Erec and Enid. Now we also have an option on The Kings of France by that promising young Barberino, and if you ask me, it’ll be the book of the year and maybe even a book of the month, because it has real grass-roots appeal. Now, if we do this Cervantes, we’ll be bringing out a book that, for all its intrinsic value, will mess up ·our whole list, because it suggests those novels are lunatic ravings.

Yes, I know all about freedom of expression, political correctness, and what have you, but we can’t very well bite the hand that feeds us. Besides, this book seems a one-shot deal. The writer has just got out of jail, he’s in bad shape, I can’t remember whether it was his arm or his leg they cut off, but he certainly isn’t raring to write something else. I’m afraid that in rushing to produce something new at all costs we might jeopardize a publishing program that has so far proved popular, moral, and (let’s be frank) prof­itable. I say no.

Manzoni, Alessandro, I Promessi sposi

These days the blockbuster novel is apparently the rage, if you have any faith in print-run figures. But there are novels and there are novels. If we had bought Doyle’s The White Company or Henty’s By Pike and Dyke, at this point we’d know what to put in our paperback line. These are books people read and will be reading two hundred years from now, because they tug at the heart, are written in simple and appealing language, don’t try to hide their regional origin, and they deal with contemporary themes like feudal unrest and the freedom of the Low Countries.

Manzoni, on the contrary, sets his novel in the seventeenth century, a period that is a notorious turnoff. Moreover, he engages in a very dubious linguistic experiment, inventing a kind of Milanese-Florentine language that is neither fish nor fowl. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as a model for young creative-writing students. But that’s not the worst. The fact is that our author sets up a lowbrow story, the tale of a poor engaged couple whose marriage is prevented by the conniving of some local overlord. In the end they do get married and everybody’s happy.

A bit thin, considering that the reader has to digest six hundred pages. Further, while ostensibly delivering an unctuous sermon on Providence, Manzoni actually unloads whole bundles of pessimism on us (he’s a Jansenist, to call him by his right name). He addresses the most melancholy reflections on human weakness and national failings to today’s public, who want something quite different, more heroic yarns, not a narrative constantly interrupted to allow the author to spout cheap philosophy or, worse, to paste together a linguistic collage, setting two seventeenth-century edicts between a dialogue half in Latin and adding pseudo-folk talk that is hardly proper for the positive heroes the public is eager for. Having just finished that fluent and flavorsome little book, Hewlett’s The Forest Lovers, I read this Promessi sposi with considerable effort. You only have to turn to page one to