The Role of the Ethnic Press in the Development of a Book Culture among Italian Immigrant readers during the Great Migration
My paper will trace the numerous ways by which the ethnic press – in particular, New York’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano and L’Eco d’Italia in late 19th and early 20th century New York – encouraged development of a book culture among Italian immigrant readers in the U.S. during the Great Migration. First, as was traditional in Europe, advertisements in newspapers by and about bookstores, printers, publishers and their wares, as about other businesses, demonstrated in the then most important communal setting, the range of Italian businesses benefitting the community in a pre-electronic era. Ads for books sold by the newspapers themselves – lists as long as or longer than 100 books frequently – jostled side by side with ads for independent Italian booksellers, for printers and, by the 1890’s and increasing steadily in the decades to come, with book publishers. Second, many Italians in America who wrote and published novels, books of poetry, histories and memoirs got their starts as writers by being editors or reporters for the Italian newspapers, including Alfredo Bosi, Adolfo Rossi, Camillo Cianfarra, Carlo Tresca and Bernardino Ciambelli, among many others. Third, besides some newspapers having their own publishing companies (Tipografia dell’Araldo Italiano, Tipografia del “Bolletino della Sera”) in some cases the newspaper’s bookstores, such as the “Libreria dell’Eco”, devolved into one of the first non-newspaper bookstores, Libreria Tocci, then into one of the first publishers, Francesco Tocci, Editore; Tocci thereafter became president of the single most prolific and important Italian book publisher/bookseller, the Società Libraria Italiana or Italian Book Store. Finally, by publishing lengthy popular French and Italian novels (the former all imported but these latter both imported and written in America) in months-long serialized form (letteratura d’appendice), the Italian newspapers developed a previously non-existent appetite among its readers for long-form fiction that became, in the case of Bernardino Ciambelli, sold as novels to these same readers.
James J. Periconi is an independent researcher and Wertheim Research Scholar at the New York Public Library’s Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities since 2018. He is a private collector of Italian-language American imprints, now housed in Special Collections and Archives at Queens College, CUNY. His 2012 catalogue, reprinted by Bordighera Press (2013), accompanied exhibitions at the Grolier Club of New York, Brooklyn College, and Seton Hall University. He was bibliographic editor for the American edition of Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880–1943 (2014). He has published on Italian American book publishing in The Routledge History of Italian Americans (2018) and on Augusto Bassetti in This Hope Sustains the Scholar (Bordighera, 2021).
