2. Una lunghissima passeggiata (25 Aprile 1945)

An incredibly long Walk

Memorie di Roberta Einaudi, editrice

3. Levi. Lionni.

Parallel Exchanges- Scambi Paralleli

Book exchanges, anniversaries, intertwined writers. In 1976 Primo Levi, writer, chemist and Jewish Shoah survivor (deported in Auschwitz) writes to thank his old friend Luciano Foà (publisher, Adelphi), with affection and lifelong gratitude, for sending him a copy of “La Botanica Parallela” by Leo Lionni (a visionary herbary of an imaginary plant kingdom ): he wishes he could have written it himself! He sends back, as a gift, his collection of poems “L’osteria di Brema”.

Leo Lionni was a writer, painter, illustrator and children author who was born 110 years ago, in May of 1910, in Amsterdam and spent his life between the United States and Italy. Hook wants to celebrate him and his quirky children books, his multiculturalism, multilingual life, his colorful blends of stories. One of his most famous books is “Little Blue and Little Yellow”, two colors that together make green. Two writers that together nourish the interconnections of this literary world, the color of hope, the color of botany.

Caro Luciano, grazie per la Botanica di Lionni che sto leggendo con gioia e con un filo d’invidia per non averla scritta io: se vedi Lionni, salutalo e diglielo. Insieme con gli auguri più sinceri ti mando un’Osteria di Brema. tuo, Primo - 10-12-76
Dear Luciano, thanks for Lionni’s Parallel Botany. I’m reading it basking in delight and a little bit of envy for not having written it myself: if you see Lionni, say hi from me and tell him what I said. Accompanied by my most sincere well wishes I’m sending you a copy of the “Osteria di Brema” Yours, Primo - 10-12-76

4. IL NUOVO SI’

Compleanno di Bobi Bazlen - Poesia

Per il suo compleanno, che lui diceva essere incerto tra il 9-10 giugno. Poesia di Bobi Bazlen, tradotta dal tedesco da Luciano Foà, trascritta da Nancy Marotta (grazie a Stefano Marotta per il documento)

Roberto Bazlen (1902-1965), ebreo triestino, è stato un traduttore, scrittore e saggista, consulente e nume tutelare di scrittori ed editori, in primis all”Adelphi con Luciano Foà.  

5. VACANZE IRGENDWANN- Un viaggio di nozze da solo

Una chicca “vacanziera”, frenetica e estraniata, immersa in un perenne irgendwann (“prima o poi” “una volta o l’altra”), come questa estate 2020.  È interessante notare in molte lettere personali di editori, poeti, scrittori del 900, visti come numi dell’orgoglio italiano, l’uso spontaneo di espressioni inglesi, tedesche, francesi, etc come “haunted da gente che non amo”, inframezzate nella frase italiana come spesso si rimprovera ai “giovani d’oggi”. Per esempio Montale, che chiudeva una lettera con “pray for my soul e buonanotte” o Gadda che infilava un “last night” o “hints” seguito da un verbo dialettale. A volte sono occhiolini colti, a volte en passant, liberi: al contempo precisi e cosmopoliti.  

Da Bobi Bazlen a Luciano Foà (editori)-1964 

6. INAUGURAZIONE GIARDINO ROBERTO BAZLEN E LUCIANO FOÀ - INAUGURATION OF THE BAZLEN -FOÀ PARK

A reflection about my great-grandfather Augusto Foà and his son (my grandfather) Luciano Foà - by Benedetta Grasso

There are many ways to tell the story of Luciano Foà, my grandfather. We could start with the books he published, now bought and collected by many, proudly displayed in their homes as a sign of “intellectual pride”: to own an "Adelphi" is something that doesn't just evoke a publishing house, but a cultural mindset, an attitude, a statement. We could start with his friend Roberto Bazlen, a mentor and a "magical" figure of the publishing world, we could start from my personal memories as a kid around the table, joking about Napoleon, or our walks in the mountains but I'd like to start from his father Augusto. It’s only recently that we found some letters. Letters or contracts with authors like Aldous Huxley, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G.Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, P. G. Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling and Georges Simenon and even The New Yorker. Which when you put it like that, it seems like I am the heir to some great fortune or the protagonist of an implausible novel. In truth, I carry a DNA of shadows, of shapeshifters and translators of ideas in the background. It was the world of Joyce and Svevo, of Musil, Walser and the birth of a modern humanistic approach, psychoanalysis, the conjunctions and clashes between the east and the West, waves of counterculture. What I inherited didn't quite have a material value or would pay for my college, but more of a cultural torch to carry on.

Some papers though opened up a world: In 1898 my great-grandpa Augusto was 21 years old walking around the streets of Paris and London with papers, books, inventions. A translator and an improvised agent, son of poor Jewish tailors in Turin, he taught himself languages, he considered translation one of the most powerful creative acts, one of ties, bridges, changing skin, adapting to society migrating words and yet clinging to a deeper sense of authenticity. He was a cultural MIDDLEMAN, in the way they were defined by British publishers like William Heinemann. He was born with a Mitteleuropean mindset, like Elias Canetti, or Joseph Roth and that’s partially why my idea of cultures never fit into stereotypes even to this day, we were carriers of words and travelers, as he was literally living the French feuilletons he was so desperate to translate.  Some of the stories about him always felt like Hugo Cabret-like clockwork inventions, like bizarre  family legends, a sort of “lessico familiare” we definitely share with a side of Italian culture that goes from Calvino, to Pavese to Montale and many others, my family would spend vacations with or send intimate letters to. When Augusto was young he started editing drafts of books around Turin, taking language classes at a small center and then going home to learn French, German, English. It was a Zelig-like transformation.He even founded a production company and made one Lumiere-style movie called “The Gates of Eden”, that only a few people saw as the company went bankrupt and closed a year later. 

One day in the late 1880s he stole a magazine from a library and the names of some literary agents in London stood out to him. It wasn’t much longer after that he decided to found the first Italian Literary Agency: ALI.  He started making deals with literary agents all across Europe at the turn of the century…He was fond of adventure novels, he was still incredibly young and he managed to publish short stories  on some of the major papers of the time. Then he got in touch with agents such as James Pinker or Robert Sommerville in Paris with Maurice Dekobra e Denyse Clairouin),in Vienna, Madrid, Berlin, New York and Amsterdam.  The fact that he had no money and transportation and communication weren’t what they are today and he was traveling all over the world baffles me. I imagine him discussing how to translate a word for hours, but my millennial brain can't even process how they would even track his letters...  Then he got married, had a son and the racial laws were put in place by the Fascists and my relatives, along with other Jews, started to lose their rights to work, to study, to own businesses; as the bombs began to fall, they hid in Ivrea, with a  where Olivetti had his factory (the man who is responsible for us using a personal computer nowadays and Steve Jobs' idol and inspiration)

His young son Luciano, my grandpa, started to help him out in his endeavors.  Then the Holocaust happened and Augusto died of shock after a series of attempted escapes and after losing everything. He died and he was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Padova. His wife died too. My grandpa, his son, survived in a work camp, where he met some of the best minds of his generations, writers, intellectuals, partisans. Back in Italy Luciano met his wife and in the 60s founded a publishing house, Adelphi...Augusto never made real money or became a billionaire, business wasn’t his strength. ALI was  then sold to Erich Linder and kept representing authors like  Bellow, Brecht, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, T. Mann, Camus, J. Roth, Salinger, Böll, Chandler, Durrell, Döblin, Dürrenmatt, Frisch, Ginsberg, Grass, Huxley, Singer, Steinbeck, Solženicyn, Updike Praz, Cecchi, Malaparte, Arbasino, Calvino, Fenoglio, Flaiano, Fruttero, N. Ginzburg, P. Levi, Mastronardi, Ortese, Parise, Sciascia, Sereni, Soldati, Vittorini, Volponi, Montanelli, Biagi, Dorfles, Pivano (who was friends of Kerouac, Ginsberg, many American writers) and more.

My grandpa Luciano grew up worshipping Europe and the world too, Musil, Kafka, Stendhal and Walser and he decided to make it his mission to recreate the atmosphere of a Vienna's cafe in Italy creating a publishing house, Adelphi, that has always been hard to describe: it’s a bit like the “New Yorker”, something people consider high-brow but take pride in, but that also published  more popular novels and engaged readers of all ages  or an object of beauty to look at, colorful books that showed my grandpa's obsessive perfectionism. The logo which nowadays seems to foreshadow emojis in a winking face, is actually inspired by a drawing of Life and Death on the same boat.  In 1962 with Roberto Olivetti, Bobi Bazlen and with the help of Alberto Zevi he founded the publishing house Adelphi. He spent his life curating, editing and picking books and he translated some texts too like Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in Italian. The Adelphi catalogue is huge and spans from Tolkien, to the BaghavadGita, to Gerald Durrell, to Nietzsche, to Kundera to philosophers to young writers.  A few years later Luciano hired a young man, Roberto Calasso, who then took over the company in the more recent years. Luciano’s life-long older mentor and friend Bobi Bazlen taught him the concept of primavoltità, a made up world for what you feel when you do something for the first time, but in a more sophisticated way, when you know something is about to change forever. By the time I came around no one told me that I had to study languages and in kindergarten I would trade sweets and snacks in exchange for a translation of a pop song or a cartoon. It's a very unique journey of grey eminences, who act behind the scenes bringing out the best in others (like editors/publishers do with authors), fixing and repairing a broken world and shaping the world to come.

7. TELEGRAFO SENZA FILI - (“Telegraph tag”)

L. Foà - E. Linder - Levanto, 1949

Luciano Foà (1915-2005) è stato un editore, fondatore della Casa Editrice Adelphi e prima, per anni, ha affiancato il padre Augusto Foà all’ALI (Agenzia Letteraria Italiana, la prima sui generis in Italia). Augusto fondò l’ALI , imparando lingue e tessendo rapporti con tutta l”Europa e il mondo, lavorandoci da fine 800 e poi entrando in contatto con l’agente Erich Linder a cui la cedette successivamente. Questo siparietto è tratto da un’estate dopo la guerra (il padre Augusto era morto, Luciano si era salvato ) e il giovane agente-editore, alle prese con un autore al mare, iniziava a tessere tutti i rapporti fondamentali al suo percorso editoriale verso la contemporaneità, contemporaneità che già incarnava nell’inseguirsi febbrilmente coi telegrafi, come oggi con mezzi più moderni.

TELEGRAPH TAG #7 Luciano Foà was a publisher (1915-2005), an editor, the founder of Adelphi Publishing House. When he was younger he helped his father Augusto Foà who conceived and created the first Italian Literary Agency, ALI. This funny exchange is a bit of "a phone tag" in the summer of 1949. Augusto had already died, Luciano was chasing a British author in Forte Dei Marmi and trying to communicate with Erich Linder, while constantly missing his messages on the telegraph. This was the beginning of a journey, that reminds us how contemporary the past can feel at times, even with older technologies

8. FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Giulio Einaudi e Luciano Foà -Venezia - 1994

9. THE DOORS TO HUXLEY

Il ruolo dell’Ali nel portare Huxley in Italia

«We were the first ones to introduce Huxley to the Italian reader in 1928», avrebbe scritto Luciano Foà alla storica casa editrice londinese Chatto & Windus nel secondo dopoguerra.

Tutto era cominciato molti anni addietro negli spazi angusti di «un libraio anarchico di via Dante, che stampò Nietzsche, Kropotkin e Wodehouse, collaborando col padre di Foà». Il libraio anarchico era Giuseppe Monanni, uno dei primi ad acquistare i diritti di traduzione in volume da Augusto Foà.

Verso la fine degli anni Venti — ha rievocato Luciano — mio padre cominciò a fornire anche editori, soprattutto grazie all’amicizia con Silvio Spaventa Filippi che dirigeva la “Domenica del Corriere”. Egli era molto amico dell’editore Monanni, a cui mio padre, che rappresentava queste agenzie straniere, ha cominciato a dare dei libri di Wodehouse, Huxley, un po' tramite l’Ali e un po' tramite Spaventa Filippi.

(…)

Augusto Foà adottò questo stesso modello contrattuale soprattutto quando credeva nel valore complessivo dell’opera di un autore, come nei casi di Richard Aldington, Charles Morgan, Rufus King fra gli altri.

Da “Cacciatori di Libri” (Gli Agenti Letterari durante il Fascismo) - Storia dell'editoria FrancoAngeli- di Anna Ferrando

10. “UN PARTICOLARE TIMBRO”

Lo Specchio del Cielo - Puntata 47

Intervista di Maurizio Ciampa a Luciano Foà del 1987 (Radio 2) sulle origini dell’Adelphi, la collaborazione e l’amicizia con Bazlen , descritto da Luciano nei dettagli per tutta l’intervista, il “progetto nuovo” con la nuova Casa Editrice nel 1962, la Biblioteca Adelphi, la grande impresa di Nietzsche, la scoperta degli autori della Mitteleuropa, la grande letteratura orientale e ebraica, la scelta delle opere agli inizi fatta da Foà, le reazioni dopo la fondazione, lo “spirito taoista” e la circolazione degli opposti. L’editore spesso riservato, qui parla facendo sentire il suo “timbro” e l’eredità dell’amico scomparso, raccontando dettagli preziosi.

“Un particolare timbro che Bazlen riconosceva nelle opere degli autori e degli scrittori e lui intravedeva attraverso il libro, cioè voleva sentire la persona che l’aveva scritto. Parlava spessissimo di libri Unici”L.F.

“L’ Altra Parte un particolare segnale che volevamo dare nella nostra attività editoriale, qualcosa che non veniva fatto dagli altri editori” L.F.

(Cliccare sul link per ascoltare l’intera intervista )

https://hubhopper.com/episode/lo-specchio-del-cielo-puntata-47-luciano-foa-e-gianfranco-menotti-1581105906

11. “ONE BALLAD MORE BEFORE WE SAY GOODNIGHT”

Sir Edmund Gosse and Augusto Foà - The London Days

“Sir Edmund William Gosse CB (/ɡɒs/; 21 September 1849 – 16 May 1928) was an English poet, author and critic.(…) His friendship with the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft inspired a successful career as a historian of late-Victorian sculpture. His translations of Henrik Ibsen helped to promote that playwright in England, and he encouraged the careers of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. He also lectured in English literature at Cambridge” (Wikipedia)

Ballade for the Funeral of the Last of the Joyous Poets

One ballade more before we say good-night,

O dying Muse, one mournful ballade more!

Then let the new men fall to their delight,

The Impressionist, the Decadent, a score

Of other fresh fanatics who adore

Quaint demons, and disdain thy golden shrine;

Ah! faded goddess, thou wert held divine

When we were young! But now each laurelled head

Has fallen, and fallen the ancient glorious line;

The last is gone, since Banville too is dead.

Peace, peace a moment, dolorous Ibsenite!

Pale Tolstoist, moaning from the Euxine shore!

Psychology, to dreamland take thy flight!

And, fell Heredity, forbear to pour

Drop after drop thy dose of hellebore,

For we look back to-night to ruddier wine

And gayer singing than these moans of thine!

Our skies were azure once, our roses red,

Our poets once were crowned with eglantine;

The last is gone, since Banville too is dead.

With flutes and lyres and many a lovely rite

Through the mad woodland of our youth they bore

Verse, like pure ichor in a chrysolite,

Secret yet splendid, and the world forswore,

For one brief space, the mocking mask it wore.

Then failed, then fell those children of the vine,--

Sons of the sun,--and sank in slow decline;

Pulse after pulse their radiant lives were shed;

To silence we their vocal names consign;

The last is gone, since Banville too is dead.

ENVOI:

Prince-jeweller, whose facet-rhymes combine

All hues that glow, all rays that shift and shine,

Farewell! thy song is sung, thy splendour fled!

No bards to Aganippe's wave incline;

The last is gone, since Banville too is dead.

Sir Edmund William Gosse

12. ONIRIC DRAWINGS

Roberto Bazlen between dreams, Jung and Tao

A small selection of three personal drawings from the 1940s. Roberto Bazlen (publisher, publishing consultant, mentor) was inspired by Jung and Ernst Bernhard. He influenced his circle of International friends and Western culture to explore freely and peek into Tao, I-Ching, the East before a “New Age culture” became mainstream.

13. COLLINE EDITORIALI

Una gita a Dogliani -C. E. Gadda scrive a Giulio Einaudi

Dogliani è stato e rimane un crocevia intellettuale e diplomatico, senza pretese, tra i vitigni: il luogo di San Giacomo, la residenza del Presidente Luigi Einaudi , al centro di una fitta attività culturale e internazionale grazie alla Biblioteca Einaudi e anche un ritrovo per l’editoria negli anni, per Giulio Einaudi, Luciano Foà e tanti altri. - La lettera è un regalo di Stefano Bartezzaghi (ottenuta da Enrico Regazzoni da Giulio Einaudi per un’intervista) e condivisa con la famiglia Grasso-Foà e Einaudi. Conservata da Benedetta Grasso, nipote di Luciano Foà.

Illustre e caro Editore,

l’accoglienza da Lei serbatoci a Torino dove si svolge l’alacre lavoro Suo e dei Collaboratori, indi a Dogliani dove ci ha così gentilmente presentato Donna Ida Einaudi, a cui abbiamo avuto l’onore di porgere i nostri omaggi, è stato motivo di profonda commozione e vuole ch’io esprima agli ospiti la più viva gratitudine. Nel percorrere e nell’ammirare a Dogliani la cospicua biblioteca di Luigi Einaudi, nel ricordare le testimonianze insigni che alla Patria rimangono dello studio, del pensiero e dell’attento volere di Lui, ho letto un monito per gli Italiani che potranno raccoglierlo, un incitamento ai migliori.

Circondato dal vitale aspetto della Sua terra e dalla operosa fortezza della Sua gente, ho compreso, se pur troppo tardi negli anni miei, che cosa significhi appartenere almeno nell’animo a una terra , a una gente.

Le sono grato di avermi reso possibile, con signorile gentilezza e con paziente comprensione dello “strano caso” che Le si presentava, una visita di cui si esaltano quei sentimenti umani che erano anche miei, che avevo pur conosciuto dal nascere, se non a ogni ora e ad ogni pagina dichiaratamente professato nel pensare e nello scrivere.

Mi creda, con riconoscenza vera e ammirazione paterna per la Sua opera di editore e di Animatore degli Studi,

Il suo

Carlo Emilio Gadda

Roma, 14 ottobre 1966

14. BEAT DETOURS

Luciano Foà e Fernanda Pivano

A tribute to the bookstore and publishing house of the Beat poets in San Francisco, CIty LIghts Bookstore, founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Gregory Corso, Jack Hirschman, WIlliam S Borough are just some of the names that had an everlasting impact on poetry, politics, activism, music, and on a group of international publishers, literary agents and translators. Luciano Foà picked one of his favorite authors, a precursor of the Beats, WIlliam Carlos Williams and published him through Adelphi, his publishing house Luciano was also a good friend of Fernanda Pivano: they exchanged letters, phone calls, lunches in Milan and Turin, and communicated back and forth with the writers and poets, having life-long relationships, not just professional ones with the movement (writers like Hemingway, Kerouac an Faulkner were rumored to be in love with Fernanda), creating an underground current from the Village, to San Francisco to the global counterculture. The influence went both ways Fernanda’s husband founded the Memphis movement, they all were crucial players in the American Folk Song Society, like Dylan, Luciano and Nanda provided the context and the breeding ground for that world, without boxes, borders, etc Fernanda used to relay to Luciano Foà her personal gossip, they’d talk about their love life, had mutual friends .

Fernanda Pivano (writer, translator, extraordinary life of the party) was the woman who became a Beat icon in her own right, the poets talked to her in an unfiltered way and she’s very much remembered in the Beat Museum and City Lights in San Francisco. Beat culture exploded in Italy in a way that it’s hard to pin down, almost like in “Searching for Sugarman” but more deeply influencing intellectuals, TV (the famous interview by Fernanda Pivano to Kerouac which aired on RAI, was a cultural milestone) and even popular songwriters.

An article in Italian on the bookstore - Un articolo dell'anno scorso sulla Stampa di Benedetta Grasso: https://www.lastampa.it/cultura/2020/04/17/news/le-donazioni-online-salvano-city-lights-la-libreria-di-san-francisco-che-fu-il-cerchio-magico-dei-beats-poets-1.38729862

15. MAESTRI

Renata Colorni - “Maestri” di Edoardo Camurri

Luciano  Foà è stato per me il più grande maestro di editoria e di  traduzione. Il tratto distintivo di Foà è un’eleganza e finezza intellettuale senza pari e una capacità di essere modello per noi tutti di buona editoria e buona traduzione.

Renata Colorni, editor e traduttrice, ha tradotto le opere di Freud, ha lavorato all’Adelphi 16 anni e per 25 ha diretto i Meridiani di  Mondadori.

(Da #Maestri di Edoardo Camurri, puntata del 9 Dicembre 21)

https://www.raiplay.it/video/2021/12/Maestri-38711b27-ecaa-42ba-bcdd-342dd92484d4.html

(You have to log into Rai Play to watch- Per guardare fare il login su Rai Play)

16. SE QUESTO È UN UOMO

Gli anni di Foà all’Einaudi e la Memoria

Prima di fondare l’Adelphi,, Luciano Foà aveva lavorato all’ALI con il padre Augusto, alle Edizioni Ivrea con Adriano Olivetti e, dal 1951 al 1961 all’Einaudi come consulente editoriale. In quegli anni le storie dei sopravvissuti della Shoah cominciano, spesso con fatica, ad emergere e Luciano ( e la moglie Mimmina) saranno cruciali nell’insistere per la pubblicazione all’Einaudi di libri come “Se questo è un uomo” e qualche anno prima del “Diario di Anna Frank” (con prefazione di Natalia Ginzburg).

Qui un estratto da “Photo Levi” di Marco Belpoliti (Edizioni Acquario, 2021)

17. LJUBA

A Borderless Love

Ljuba Blumenthal was born in Ukraine, became British and spent most of her life having life-long friends and soulmates in Southern Europe and Italy. She would talk about her childhood as a Jewish refugee openly, she'd keep up with the royal gossip in England, had a poem dedicated to her by Eugenio Montale and spent unconventional vacations with the love of her life Bobi Bazlen (often visiting as guests of my grandparents), exchanging letters that blended English, German and Italian.

When Bobi died she said, flying back to England, that she felt invisible on that plane. People couldn't see her. She was always described to me as quirky, humorous, unique, aloof, ethereal, witty.
After my parents got married they went on a trip to Cornwall. While she had loved and "dated" Bobi for decades, they had a very unconventional relationship, in their middle age, and she was also at some point married to a British man. My parents met some of her step-kids and became close. In a very non-traditional way they "inherited" some of her possessions, including a locket I always kept as a good luck charm. Inside the locket there was a picture of Bobi, who had died in 1965. Bobi happened to be my grandfather's best friend for decades, his older mentor and collaborator. They built catalogues of books, they built a vision together, even before the existence of any publishing house. When Bazlen died my grandfather entered that hotel room, saw the body and was handed his letters, his personal stuff, his possessions. Bobi and Ljuba never had kids.
Bobi and Ljuba were two names I always heard together as a synonym for soulmates. They talked about witty things, they didn't care about passports, they opposed wars. It was a couple I always heard mentioned associated with Love (Ljuba literally means love) but in quite a modern way. They would see each other a few times a year and in a recent documentary Ezra Pound's daughter said, laughing, that they used to arrive to her castle with a lot of suitcases and leave with almost none. Who knows what happened to those bags? Everyone had funny, magical stories about them.

The idea that Love didn’t need to be typical and that history isn't linear was clear to me looking at their relationship.

Even when he was young in the 1920s/1930s Bobi was part of a group of international, fluid young people who practiced forms of almost polyamorous 'free love" (there are letters from the same Austrian woman to multiple lovers, or Bobi's young feverish notes to the young women he loved). They were open to experimentation, to I ching, to freedom, closer to Huxley, the village,or the romantics. They wrote fervent letters, as quick as texts, spoke about sex openly, a proto-counterculture that defied the mores of the era or the "neorealistic" post-war narrow lens that would follow. They weren't rich, but lived seeking friendships, love and pleasures.

Ljuba lived in a borderless world, where people came before maps and boxes. Where fluidity was the norm, in a asynchronous synchronicity.

18. CHARMANT ET DISCRETE

Father and son

“Je me souviens fort bien de votre père qui a été le premier intermédiaire entre Mondadori et moi-même au moment où Mondadori a publié certains de mes romans populaires. C’était un homme charmant et discret. Je suis heureux que vous ayez continué dans la même ligne à votre tour”

Georges Simenon to Luciano Foà (Talking about his father Augusto).

Lettera di Georges Simenon a Luciano Foà, 7 ottobre 1986, Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, Fondo Foà, Cartella 3 fasc. 45.

Augusto Foà was a literary agent that dealt with the likes of Huxley, Kipling and Conan Doyle and founded ALI but died losing everything during the Nazi-fascist prosecutions. His son Luciano continued his decades long work after the war by founding the publishing house Adelphi.