When you have a foreign bookshop, the work you do locally becomes even more essential: getting people to learn about Italian literature, telling people about Italian literature, and, whenever possible, doing this together with the authors and translators. Initiatives such as literary circles (we founded La Giostra) get readers to exchange opinions and ideas, while presentations of books in the presence of their authors enable readers to form opinions and learn about the craft of telling stories. I also think that you always need to give them a chance to contribute to making it a space in which they can meet people, exchange ideas and grow personally. Readers should be able to frequent a bookshop and feel at home there. I think that a bookshop has to be run remembering that it is a space to be shared. In your experience, which initiatives are most useful in attracting the public’s attention and gaining the loyalty of customers? Moreover, very often, Italian language courses also use literary texts as a way of learning the Italian language and culture. And we shouldn’t forget the books of authors we present in the bookshop, which are often bilingual events, as these moments of socialisation and mingling help us to present Italian books, and their translations, to a greater number of readers. Italian crime stories are most in demand, especially those set in certain cities or regions, but, above all, the original editions of the books which, arriving in translation in the German-language book market, arouse the interest of readers abroad. Which Italian authors are most in demand? And this means that I choose by trying to find the right balance between titles and authors that are in demand and others that are less well-known, trying to work as much as possible with independent publishers. For me, who has to choose these books carefully, I think there are a lot of books, but obviously compared to the number of new publications each year, there are not really that many. The rest is non-fiction, with as many topics and interests as we can manage: travel, cooking, art, music, biographies, science, philosophy, history and current affairs, economics, mythology, feminism, the environment, literary criticism and a section devoted to Vienna. For their independent reading, we have books that have been selected for the Premio Strega Ragazzi (the children’s section of the Strega Prize), which thanks to the Italian librarian Anna Bellé and the translator Tania Spagnoli, also includes a group of readers and voters from Vienna. About a fifth of the books are for children, above all illustrated albums and stories to read aloud. Then we have about 4000 books in the French section, while the Italian section, in which there are around 2500 books, contains both original Italian editions and translations.Īt least half of the books in the Italian section are works of fiction, including gialli (crime stories), which are almost all original Italian versions and are arranged on a regional basis, and then there are poetry and graphic novels. Most of the books in my bookshop are in German, with a particular focus on children’s books and fiction. Hartliebs Bücher, Livres & Libri (PorzellangaWien), opened in 2013, is a German, French and Italian bookshop in which each section is managed by a mother-tongue bookseller.ĭoes your bookshop only sell original Italian versions of books or also translations? What criteria do you use when selecting Italian books and what is the ratio between literature, non-fiction, comic books and children’s books?
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