Tony Blair’s On Leadership, François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century and Voltaire’s Letters on the English are the first three releases of the new publishing house.

Tony Blair’s On Leadership is part of the Libera series dedicated to works that discuss current affairs. Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion and Voltaire’s Letters on the English, translated into Italian for the first time by Antonio Gurrado, were conceived in the Biblioteca series, focusing on great classics that have stood the test of time.

How can we set priorities and deal with crises? How can we balance short-term victories with long-term structural changes? What is the best way to attract investment, to reform healthcare or education, and to ensure public safety? These are just some of the most significant questions that constitute the cornerstone of Tony Blair’s essay on the art of governing. The former British prime minister draws on more than a decade of experience in government, refusing to avoid the major issues that are still unresolved on the world stage and must be tackled head-on in order to assist the leaders of our time. The author’s track record, his commitment to supporting developing countries, working for peace in the Middle East and combating extremism have provided him with the tools to make a lucid and disenchanted judgement on today’s political situation. Never before has the quality of a nation’s government been as crucial to its success as it is today. There are countries that have the same population, similar resources and the same growth potential, yet some perform well, while others implode: the nature of leadership therefore becomes a decisive factor between growing and struggling states.

In On Leadership, technology is a voice in its own right, which is not considered one of the phenomena that leaders must manage, but rather the “epochal transformation” that affects all governments, which requires a decision on which side to take and whether to harbour outdated prejudices or to be open to change, first and foremost of ourselves. In chapter 19, we read: [generative AI represents] a radical alteration of the fundamental principles on which [the system] is based.” According to Blair, the technological revolution “makes it possible to implement measures that have real consequences in a reasonably short period of time – within an election cycle”, as “artificial intelligence is the only realistic way to improve productivity in the private sector [and] in the public service.” At the same time, Blair wants to emphasise that “it is up to each leader to decide how they want to use this all-encompassing revolution.”

On the historical front, the Biblioteca series features the figure of François Furet, known for his seminal works on the French Revolution and Communism, and for having directed the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris during his long career. The historian, in his work The Passing of an Illusion, edited by Marina Valensise, discusses the communist idea by analysing the difficult relationship between the expectations raised in terms of socio-economic conditions and what was achieved until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The author clarifies this paradox by pointing out as a hallmark of Leninism “the idea that old Russia, fresh out of Czarism, invents a social and political regime that can and should serve as an example to Europe and the whole world, placing itself moreover in continuity with the history of the West.” This claim nurtured by the Bolsheviks from 1918 onwards is still echoed in Furet’s words: “illusion does not <accompany> communist history: it is constitutive of it.” The denial of the facts makes “the story of the illusion of communism” even more compelling. This is the theme of the book and not the history of communism, as the author seeks to emphasize in the preface.

Also included in the Biblioteca series, Voltaire’s Letters on the English (Italian edition edited by Antonio Gurrado) is a highly topical work despite the different scenario that accompanied its inception.  Voltaire’s focus is the theme of overcoming the logic of feudal government to arrive at a more liberated society, free of superstition and passionate about scientific knowledge. The pivotal theme underlying the publisher’s approach, namely freedom, therefore returns, contextualising Letters on the English in the most suitable cultural context for its enhancement.
In its attack on religious and political intolerance and, at the same time, in its defence of empirical thinking and the experimental method, Letters on the English, originally written in England between 1727 and 1728 and published in London in August 1733, constitutes one of the very first expressions of Enlightenment thought, a manifesto of the values that shaped the emergence of 18th-century culture. It is no coincidence that Oliver Goldsmith, the Irish writer and playwright, described Voltaire as “the poet and philosopher of Europe”.
The work, translated for the first time directly from the original written almost entirely in English, is presented to the public in the knowledge that Voltaire decided to spend two years in England in order to become an English author, with a plan that therefore went beyond the motivations of mere travel.
At the same time, Voltaire was also a pioneer in terms of knowledge dissemination, since he was one of the first to successfully convey the ideas of English philosophers to the general public.
For these reasons, Letters on the English undoubtedly ranked among the best-selling 18th-century books in the British Isles: fourteen more editions were published over the course of the century.
Voltaire therefore managed to establish himself not ‘in spite of’ having written in a foreign language, but ‘because’ he had written in a foreign language such as English “the language of a free nation […] the only one that could express with vigour what I could only sketch faintly in my native tongue.”

Reading is a journey that leads us to discover new worlds, different cultures and, most importantly, ourselves. What better time to indulge in this practice than during the summer?

Why is summer reading so special?

With its long days and more relaxed pace, summer offers the ideal time and attitude for reading. Without the hustle and bustle of everyday life, we can finally indulge in the pleasure of leafing through a book, letting ourselves be captivated by the stories and losing ourselves in the words. Reading during the summer helps us expand our horizons, stimulating our imagination, keeping our minds exercised and reducing stress.

Here are our recommendations for holiday reading

Whatever your destination, we thought we’d offer you a collection of books selected from the most read and appreciated titles of our publishing houses (Battello a vapore, De Agostini, Einaudi, Electa, Mondadori, Mondadori Electa, Mondadori Children’s Books, Piemme, Rizzoli and Sperling & Kupfer, Star Comics and Utet), designed to satisfy readers of all ages.

Today, Alice Cairati takes up the position of Communications and Promotion Manager of the Piemme, Sperling & Kupfer and Electa publishing houses, reporting directly to General Manager Stefano Peccatori.

Born in Milan in 1984, she graduated from the University of Milan with honours in Philosophical Sciences. Cairati began her professional career with the Mondadori Group 13 years ago, at the Mondadori Electa publishing house. After three years of experience in marketing, she shifted to communications and events in 2014, before becoming Communications Manager for the Varia line of Mondadori Electa, Sperling & Kupfer, Piemme in 2019.

The new communications structure entrusted to Alice Cairati was designed to develop integrated communication plans, in which the press office, digital communications and promotion are coordinated strategically and effectively. In this respect, Cetta Leonardi is head of the Radio and TV Press and Promotion Office, Alessandro Ventura is head of the Digital Communications and Promotion Office, while Cairati remains responsible for the Events Office.

As of Monday, 15 July, Frida Sciolla will join Mondadori Group as Communications Manager for the Children’s Business Unit (Mondadori, Rizzoli, Fabbri and Piemme with the Battello a Vapore and Geronimo Stilton brands) and De Agostini Libri (De Agostini, UTET), reporting directly to Lorenzo Garavaldi, General Manager of the Children’s Business Unit and Managing Director of De Agostini Libri.

Frida Sciolla will be responsible for defining the communication guidelines of a strategic and diverse area, focusing her expertise, imagination and experience on the various editorial products.

Born in Savona in 1977, she graduated from the University of Bologna in Communication Sciences and worked on the first year of the Masters in Publishing directed by Umberto Eco. She spent fourteen years at Bompiani publishing house, first as Press Officer, then as Press Office Manager, following releases and supporting leading Italian and international authors. Sciolla then joined HarperCollins Italy, where, starting in 2017, she held the position of Communications and Press Office Manager.

Milan is celebrating Enrico Baj (Milan, 31 October 1924 – Vergiate, 16 June 2003), a master of the Italian and international neo-avant-garde, with an extensive retrospective that will stand out among exhibitions this autumn, as it is designed to cover all the topics and subjects of his long and multifaceted experience.

Baj returns to Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale exactly a hundred years after his birth and twelve years after the exhibition I Funerali dell’anarchico Pinelli (The Funerals of the Anarchist Pinelli) was held in the same room. For the first time, this exhibition will be integrated in an anthological itinerary and a timely dialogue with other works by the master.

Promoted by the Municipality of Milan – Culture and produced by Palazzo Reale with Electa, the project is curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj and includes nearly fifty works distilled in a time span ranging from the early 1950s to the dawn of 2000. It crosses the artist’s research phases and his adherence to different movements over time: from the revival of Dadaism and Surrealism to the modes of Informal art, from his closeness to the Nordic CoBrA to the genesis of the Nuclear art movement, which Baj founded in Milan with Sergio Dangelo in 1951. Starting from the gestural abstraction of his beginnings, passing through the birth of his larval anthropomorphic figures and the eruption of the liquefied mountains in the magmatic body of the Generals, the exhibition touches on the parody of extraterrestrial invasions, reaching the Meccano army and the animated world of chests of drawers and trumeaux.

His characters that have become part of the common imagination — the Ladies and Generals, the Ultrabodies, the Mirrors, the Furniture and the Monsters of the Apocalypse — will animate a flurry of creatures from the surrealist and sci-fi universe of an artist who made irony and the grotesque a picklock for dismantling bourgeois conformism and taking sides against all forms of consolidated power.

His celebrated aesthetics of trinkets and trimmings, tassels and shiny buttons like insignia on the truncated chests of his emblazoned soldiers, is a thread that stitches together sections of the broadest themes of Baj’s poetics, freed from a rigid chronological sequence or genre classification, with continuous cross-references between art and literature, colours and words, following a sort of script that, also in the setting, suggests a theatrical time and space for observers.

From 16 July to 13 September 2024, in anticipation of the major retrospective at Palazzo Reale, the Museum of Natural History on Corso Venezia will also host a tribute dedicated to by the artist’s engravings and books, in which Enrico Baj classified the natural world with irony and imagination. Under the title Enrico Baj. Zoologia fantastica e altre nature (Fantastic Zoology and Other Natures) will feature 22 panels divided among the Manuale di zoologia fantastica (Manual of Fantastic Zoology), Paradiso perduto (Paradise Lost), the folder I Fiori (The Flowers, with its visionary botany), as well as etchings from the famous De Rerum Natura of 1958, a homage (reinvented) to Lucretius’ Latin poem.

BAJ. BajchezBaj is also in Savona and Albissola Marina.
The unique catalogue published by Electa

To mark the centenary of the Milanese artist’s birth, an exhibition curated by Luca Bochicchio and dedicated to Baj’s ceramic work in all its historical and chronological development opens on 8 October. Entitled BAJ. Baj chez Baj will open at the Ceramics Museum in Savona, with a section also at MuDA – Museo Diffuso Albisola in Albissola Marina, in the exhibition centre and Casa Museo Jorn. The scientific collaboration between Milan and Savona, among curators and institutions, aims to outline two independent yet complementary itineraries paying homage to Baj’s eclectic genius. This is documented in the single catalogue published by Electa, in which the two exhibition itineraries unravel between places, forms, materials and encounters, tracing Baj’s fascinating cosmogony, an epiphany of intelligence and creativity.

Baj will also become a topic in Electa’s A-Z series, an array of monographic titles on eclectic 20th-century figures.

Debuting on 5 September with an essay by Tony Blair on the art of governing is the new Silvio Berlusconi Editore, a publishing house founded by Mondadori Group with the purpose of focusing on liberal and democratic thought.

‘Silvio Berlusconi Editore,’ explains Marina Berlusconi, President of the Group ,‘will have a very precise objective: fighting for the concept of freedom and giving a voice to its broadest variations, while remaining absolutely separate from any form of political militancy. We decided to name this new publishing house after my father, Silvio Berlusconi, because his projects, his achievements, his life were founded on freedom. With no compromises. Talking about freedom today is more important than ever. Our society, Western society, appears increasingly threatened: wars, strengthening autocratic regimes, and the aversion that not a few of us show for the values our history was built on, starting with the most precious asset we have, freedom. An asset that we now see called into question.

Series

The publishing house will release a limited number of titles each year, divided into two series. The first, ‘Biblioteca’, will collect important books to be published or republished, translated for the first time or translated again, but classic books nevertheless, either already recognised or destined to become so. ‘Libera’, the second series, is dedicated to contemporary authors tackling open questions on current events. In fact, the publisher aims to alternate past and present beyond any scheme, while focusing on both literature and non-fiction, Italian and foreign authors.

Titles Being Released

With On Leadership. Lessons for the 21st Century, Tony Blair has written a manual for ‘an art of good governance’ that he wished he had known when he began his long political career. A synthesis of lessons in leadership from years of experience at the top of a large, long-standing liberal democracy.

A work that answers some fundamental questions: How can we prioritise and deal with crises? How can we balance short-term victories with long-term structural changes? What is the best way to attract investment, to reform healthcare or education and to ensure citizen safety? And what should governments do to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the 21st-century technological revolution? A decade at the helm of the United Kingdom, a commitment to supporting developing countries, working for peace in the Middle East and the fight against extremism have given Tony Blair the tools to judge today’s political situation clearly, immersing himself in various and often conflicting settings and scenarios.

Together with the release of On Leadership, two classics published in the ‘Biblioteca’ series enhance the Silvio Berlusconi Editore line. Voltaire’s Letters on the English, a work written in 1727 and 1728, during the author’s stay in England, recounts the political model of the parliamentary monarchy, religious tolerance, and the dynamism of a society in which scientists and men of culture played a fundamental role, in contrast to the tyrannical French feudal model. In this edition, the French philosopher’s classic is translated for the first time from English, the language in which it was written almost in its entirety.

The classics in the ‘Biblioteca’ series also include The Passing of an Illusion by François Furet, a historian known for his studies on the French Revolution and long-time director of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. This is a fundamental work of 20th-century history that seeks to understand the influence that communist ideas long exerted on Western intellectuals, despite the tragic experiences that marked it, first in the USSR, and then in other countries.

2025

With his eyes on Russia, more modern this time, Alexander Baunov, a philologist of antiquity, has written The End of the Regime, a book that has become a bestseller in his homeland as a symbol of resistance to Putin. The first translation in the world will be published in 2025 by Silvio Berlusconi Editore in the ‘Libera’ series.  The work focuses on an analysis of the fall of the regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain, António Salazar in Portugal and the colonels in Greece, capturing moments in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Without ever explicitly mentioning them, analogies with the contemporary history of Putin’s Russia, are the key to grasping the different historical frameworks analysed by Baunov.

Also coming out in bookshops in 2025 is I giorni contati, a new essay by Ernesto Galli della Loggia in the ‘Libera’ series. Without making allowances, the historian and editor of ‘Corriere della Sera’ addresses the state of Western civilisation, which is denying its roots and no longer seems to remember its values. Rather than inviting us to feel sorry for ourselves, the diagnosis is a combative call to resistance, a reprimand to remember who we are and fight for our existence.

In 2025, the ‘Libera’ series will also publish Ragazzi di carta velina by Walter Siti, editor of the works by Pier Paolo Pasolini and winner of the Strega Prize in 2013 with Resistere non serve a niente. The great writer reflects on the fragility of children, making it an interpretative paradigm that runs through many of the changes taking place in our society. In his analysis, Siti chooses the language of the latest generation as a starting point to understand the dynamics of a social context in which no one wants to offend and everyone considers themselves a victim.

Finally, Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity and Bourgeois Equality are the titles of Deirdre N. McCloskey’s ‘Bourgeois Trilogy’, which will be published in the Silvio Berlusconi Editore ‘Biblioteca’ series next year. The author, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. and Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois Chicago, aims to show that capitalism and bourgeois values are a pillar of social, economic and cultural progress, in contrast to certain prejudices that persist in the public debate.

Starting on 26 June 2024, www.silvioberlusconieditore.it will be online with the first previews.

The Mondadori Group participates in the celebration of love in all its forms and nuances through some of the most interesting and representative books published by our publishing houses, dealing with themes such as diversity.

In our Group, we strive every day to build a more inclusive world where everyone can feel loved and accepted. So this month, through the power of words, writing and reading, we want to promote stories that speak a universal language: the language of love.

Electa will be present at the 60^th International Art Exhibition with dedicated publishing offers and updated layouts for its bookshops at the Venice Biennale.

At the bookshop: selected spaces, objects and books

The bookshop at the Arsenale Corderie (project by Migliore + Servetto Architects, 2022), also coordinated with the bookshop at the Giardini della Biennale, will have a new identity thanks to the graphic project by the Sonnoli studio to enhance the Biennale’s historical posters, drawn from the Biennale Library – ASAC.
In the same spaces, Electa will be presenting six official merchandising lines, including institutional ones curated by Studio De Valence and Marco Camuffo, plus the line of novelties designed for this edition by the Brazilian studio Campo.

Maintaining a focus on reading, Electa has also worked on an ‘author’s’ selection of titles. In fact, part of the titles at the bookshops were entrusted to an external ‘search’, presenting an unprecedented slant on the many themes of contemporary culture suggested by the exhibition. Anna Toscano, a writer, photographer and journalist who teaches Italian at Ca’ Foscari and other universities, seized the challenge to cross the threads connected with Adriano Pedrosa’s Biennale Arte 2024, developing a selection of around 300 titles in Italian and English, ranging from novels to essays to poetry.
Philosophical books, anthropological essays, comic books, photobooks, anthologies and short stories were identified and listed under four keywords, four suggestions that run through their contents and trace their trajectory.

Geography, with themes related in different ways and forms to migration, decolonisation, travelling and movement, and thus to people, bodies, language and anthropology;
Language, with titles that explore language in the broadest sense of the term;
People incorporates the concept of individuals and collectivity and traces a path through identity, gender, bodies, activism, migration, ideas, feminism, anthropology, philosophy and decolonisation;
Venice is a tribute that includes texts for leaving the stereotypical image of the Lagoon and entering an awareness of what the city of the Biennale has been, what it is and what it can become.

The four themes, however, intentionally represent a non-categorical selection, in which the boundary between topics can be ‘disputed’ and a book can find a place in the ‘word’ next to it. As with genres, this bibliography is in fact designed to elide or shift the boundary between literary genres: poetry sometimes tends to prose and prose to non-fiction, which can also cross over into poetry or philosophy. There are no limits to this division. Indeed it is a sharing of words without borders, because “when we all recognise ourselves as foreigners”, as Julia Kristeva writes, borders no longer have any reason to exist.

The range of books is completed with the catalogues of the Pavilions and Country Participations, illustrated volumes on the artists present in the International Exhibition, new publications on art/photography/fashion/graphic design, art commentary and focuses on refugee artists and writers.

The Electa catalogues for the Art Biennale 2024

For the 60^th Venice Biennale, Electa is publishing Due qui/To Hear, the guide to the Italian Pavilion, edited by Luca Cerizza and designed by Studio Folder, presenting the project by Massimo Bartolini in collaboration with Caterina Barbieri, Gavin Bryars and Kali Malone.

Among other Electa publications for the 60^th International Art Exhibition, we would like to mention the catalogue of the Saudi Arabian National Pavilion, curated by Maya El Khalil and Jessica Cerasi, where Manal Aldowayanis exhibiting the work Shifting Sands: A Battle Song, and the book H2O Venezia: Diari d’Acqua – Water Diaries, curated by Mara Hofmann, the catalogue of a collective exhibition resulting from a residency programme for women artists who worked on a visual narrative about Venice.

Parallel to the 60th Venice Biennale, the exhibition Uzbekistan: Avant-Garde in the Desert. The Form and the Symbol, curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri and promoted and supported by the Foundation for the Development of Art and Culture of Uzbekistan, is opening at Ca’ Foscari University. This exhibition introduces the Italian and international public to a little-known page of artistic history in the first half of the 20th century. It presents over 100 works from the Tashkent Museum and the Nukus Museum, long described as the ‘Louvre of the Desert’, highlighting the connection between the Russian Avant-Garde and Central Asian art. Electa Catologue (Italian and English editions).

Also available at Electa bookshops is the Guide to the Pavilions of the Venice Biennale since 1877, in Italian and English editions, edited by Marco Mulazzani.

Knopf publishing house has announced the publication of Alexei Navalny’s memoir, Patriot. The book will be released on 22 October and published in Italy by Mondadori.

Navalny started writing Patriot in 2020, shortly after he was poisoned. The book tells the whole story of his life: his youth, the time he felt the need to devote himself to activism, his marriage and family, his commitment to democracy, and freedom in Russia, which saw him stand up to a world superpower determined to silence him. Navalny was convinced that change could not be resisted, that change will come eventually, and these pages clearly express his message.

With a wealth of gripping details, including unpublished letters from prison, Navalny recounts his political career, the various attempts on his life and the lives of those closest to him, as well as the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime.

Navalny’s widow, Julija Navalnaya, comments, «This book is a testimony not only to Alexei’s life, but also to his unwavering commitment to the fight against dictatorship, a fight for which he sacrificed everything, including his life. In these pages, readers will come to know the man I loved deeply, a man of absolute integrity and courage. Telling his life story is a way of honouring his memory and inspiring others to fight for what is right and to never lose sight of the values that really matter».

Written with the passion, acumen, candour and courage for which Navalny was rightly acclaimed, Patriot is his last letter to the world, a touching account of the last years he spent in the world’s most brutal prison, a reminder of why the principles of individual freedom are inalienable, a pressing exhortation to continue the work for which he gave his life.

The book is being published worldwide and will be released in hardback, e-book and audio book editions. The global release date is 22 October 2024. In the US, the first print run is 500,000 copies.

The Mondadori Group reports today that it has signed an agreement for the acquisition by the subsidiary Rizzoli International Publications Inc. of 100% of the share capital of Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Founded 40 years ago by Ian and Margo Baldwin, the publisher is based in Vermont (USA) and in the UK through its subsidiary Chelsea Green Publishing UK Ltd. Its editorial focus is sustainability – particularly green, health and wellness issues – and promoting cultural diversity.

The Mondadori Group already has a presence in the United States through its subsidiary Rizzoli International Publications Inc., a leading publisher of illustrated English-language books on Lifestyle and Interior Design, which has also owned the historic Rizzoli bookstore in New York for the past 60 years.

With the acquisition of Chelsea Green Publishing, the Mondadori Group is taking a further step on its international development journey in English-speaking markets, which recently began with the establishment of London-based Rizzoli UK.

“The strengthening of the Mondadori Group’s presence in the United States and the United Kingdom through the acquisition of Chelsea Green Publishing, and the launch of Rizzoli’s new UK branch, are further steps on our growth path outside the domestic trade market. I am therefore delighted to welcome Chelsea Green Publishing, with whom we share a vision of quality editorial content focused on issues related to sustainability and lifestyles that respect ecosystems and nature,” commented Mondadori Group CEO Antonio Porro.

Consideration for the transaction, which will be paid fully in cash on the closing date – expected by the end of the first half of 2024 – is set at $5 million (on a debt-and-cash free basis) and will be subject to adjustment according to the NFP on the date of completion of the acquisition. In the last approved financial statements (2022), the company reported consolidated revenues of USD 8.1 million and an operating income of USD 1.1 million.

As part of this acquisition, Margo Baldwin will assume the role of Publisher Emeritus of Chelsea Green Publishing, guaranteeing the publishing quality and continuity of the company with her extensive experience. Stefano Peccatori will assume the role of CEO and President, leading the international development and strategic integration, working with the Rizzoli International Publications Inc. and Chelsea Green Publishing teams.