Sciascia invites us to read

The texts that this volume brings together are those that the great Sicilian author wrote with his Olivetti Lettera 22 and between wisps of smoke, to accompany, in the form of flaps, reading points or editorial notes, the works that saw the light of day in the collections of the publishing house Sellerio in which he worked as editor.

They form a collection of

as defined by Genette in

and to which the French theoretician consecrated his study

, in which he defines the concept of

to which the texts at hand are specifically accommodated, since they are not the author's children but the editor's work, so that their status as ancillary, subordinate texts, adjacent to a given text, could well lead to a unsuspecting reader to consider them trivial and, consequently, superfluous.

Far from being so, they constitute an inexcusable corpus when it comes to composing the exact image of an eminent figure as well as polyhedral of the letters of the 20th century such as Sciascia, who satisfied his concerns from literature, journalism and politics by thinking and writing with haste, as Manolo Vázquez Montalbán did among us, also performing invaluable work in the field of publishing, as other great writers did throughout the last century, and let us note André Gide

Gallimard, Cesare Pavese at Einaudi, the Turin publishing house where Italo Calvino worked diligently following in the footsteps of his mentor Elio Vittorini and his famous flaps from the

collection , later Michael Krüger at Carl Hanser or, of course, Roberto Calasso, who wrote countless texts for the fourth cover of the books that enriched Adelphi's magnificent catalog —a hundred of which, and among them the flap dedicated to Sciascia's novel

, are grouped together in the volume

and that, as if that were not enough, he wanted to theorize about this kind of text that, in a "narrow rhetorical cage, no less severe than the one a sonnet can offer", try to "say few effective words, as when a friend to a friend” (“Solapa de lapas”,

), the words that the editor would like to spark a fertile idyll between author and reader.

He was a writer with an editor's eye, like André Gide, Cesare Pavese or Italo Calvino

As with many other editorial practices, the precursor in the elaboration of this kind of annexed texts was the illustrious Aldo Manuzio, author of

, of prologue letters that, far exceeding the mere function of

, gave the reader an unusual role. at that time.

The Renaissance publisher, some of whose preliminary texts have just been brought together in

(Ampersand, 2022), knew that the book had to win over its reader, a certainty that has been shared ever since by all literary publishers, proudly, as the founder of Anagram on the pages of

, to be in charge of the writing of the suasory texts with which to refer to the reader the benefits of the book.

In his note on

by Anatole France, he confesses to the reader, with exquisite style, that the work is "an apology for skepticism, salutary at a time when certainties die at the same time that we die of certainties";

his irony leads him to ensure that

of his friend Bufalino was written during "the neorealist ice age";

he writes flaps for his own works as if they were other people's works;

To review Piccolomini's Tale

, he turns to Stendhal, quoting Raphael;

he deals with Voltaire to Santa Teresa, from Montesquieu

to Goethe war correspondent;

he uses Kundera and

to explain what reality really is .

by Sahagún;

In his note on an essay by Mary McCarthy, he points to a sentence that reads "to disarm and mislead critics and literature teachers, who are the main enemies of the reader."

Intelligent and comparativist texts that relate, reveal and seduce.

His vast culture is never overwhelmed because Sciascia uses it naturally

The vast culture of Sciascia, which his books reflect without ever being fooled because he looks at them with the naturalness with which Géricault, Mallarmé, Freud or Bellini do the narration of

, and which shines in his anthology

, a book in which he also exhibits his exceptional reading skills, is what allows the author of

―recently republished by Tusquets― write the texts of the tabs or

without the slightest hint of vacuity.

Leonardo Sciascia, writer and editor.

The happiness of writing books

, whose quarter of covers perhaps, due to its convoluted nature, would not have pleased the author —although its juicy paratexts would have satisfied him, on the other hand— reveals the amazing diligence and extreme intelligence of Sciascia in the task of writing reading (and rereading to give new life to a book, as he points out in "Of rereading",

), reviewing and promoting a book, but above all he shows that his intellectual world knew no limits and that, being an islander, its context was infinite.

There is no doubt that the author of

, so enthusiastic about our culture, would have been pleased to know that his editorial notes, which twenty years ago saw the light for the first time in Italy, were fully translated into Spanish.

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