The annual “Scuola per Librai Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri” is scheduled to commence in Venice on January 31st.
This year’s program’s theme is “The Book Between Eternity and Change.” On January 31, the 42nd seminar of this “School for Booksellers” will again be seated in Venice. And the round table at the center of its “book between” motif is titled Constants and Variables of the Publishing Profession, a carefully prepared discussion looking at some of the dichotomies in the international book industry—developments that can seem new at one moment and yet curiously familiar.
Under the supervision of Stefano Mauri, president of Messaggerie Italiane and of Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol (GeMS)—Italy’s second largest publishing group and the national leader in debut fiction—the annual Friday program is unique in world book publishing, and not just for its opulent setting in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini‘s tapestry showcase, the Salone degli Arazzi.
Stefano Mauri is joined by Alberto Ottieri—vice-president and CEO of Messaggerie Italiane, president of Emmelibri, and president of the Fondazione Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri—in staging the week’s School for Booksellers that precedes the Friday conference. The entire event is expertly delivered by the foundation’s secretary-general Nana Lohrengel.
This year, Mauri opened the weeks of exchanges that prepare the 90-minute round table with an interest in “what makes our job as publishers always changing, and yet in some ways always the same—and different from many other businesses.
“For instance our ‘products’ most of the time are not ‘ours,’ he said. “They’re the intellectual property of someone outside the company, an author. But still we give a physical format to the object and print our trademark on it.
“Our ‘products’ have eyes and brains. Authors watch the way we treat them. This makes a big difference between publishing and most other businesses.”
Again this year, Mauri has assembled a commanding panel of publishing leadership to explore this question of the constants and variables of the book business. Friday morning’s program is headlined by:
Jesús Badenes, Grupo Planeta
Véronique Cardi, Éditions JC Lattès
Sonia Draga, Sonia Draga Publishing House and the Federation of European Publishers
Felicitas von Lovenberg, Piper Verlag
Stefano Mauri, Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol
Moderated by Publishing Perspectives, this round-table discussion and the programming that precedes and follows it form a temporary think tank, an annually intense morning’s symposium on the state of the business and its changing debates.
Article courtesy of Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Publishing Perspectives
Photo: The Scuola UEM’s producers: From left, Stefano Mauri, Alberto Ottieri, and Nana Lohrengel (Publishing Perspectives)
