Garamond launches Project Hermes

Garamond launches Project Hermes as a publishing scheme built around a paradox: scholarship will lend authority to occult subjects, while commercial books will turn that authority into a market. Presented after Professor Bramanti’s visit, the project is not simply a new list of titles. It is a plan to make the traffic between serious research and popular appetite profitable for both Garamond and Manutius.

The Market Garamond Sees

Bramanti’s talk prompts Garamond to explain what he has been observing for several days. He brings out three successful books: one by a famous critic, described by its subtitle as a Gnostic novel; a mystery best-seller about a Gnostic church near Turin; and a journalist’s account of occult practices in the same modern city. The range matters more to Garamond than the books’ scholarly distinctions. Readers, he believes, are drawn to material that joins disparate subjects and offers alternatives to what they encountered at school.

His market survey extends beyond those examples. He recalls visiting a bookshop once associated with anarchist, revolutionary, terrorist, and Marxist writing, only to find that its stock had been recast around the occult themes Bramanti discussed. Even a respectable bookshop now has a section devoted to occult sciences, where university studies sit beside books by popular authors. Garamond’s point is not that these writers share credentials or have met one another. It is that readers can treat them as if they belong to the same conversation.

That appetite, in his account, makes the audience “omnivorous.” Templars, cabala, lotteries, and tea leaves can be taken up together, not because a rigorous argument has established their connection, but because each can feed a reader’s interest in hidden meanings. Garamond recognizes this indiscriminate appetite as a commercial opening. He also sees a way to address it without pretending that the distinction between academic work and popular occult writing has disappeared.

Two Firms, Two Kinds of Books

Garamond proposes a new branch, Project Hermes, and Casaubon supplies the suggestive title Isis Unveiled for a prospective book. Garamond approves it for its evocation of ancient Egypt and its slightly black-magical cover, which he thinks will attract buyers without appearing excessive. The exchange shows that the project’s popular side is conceived not only in terms of subject matter but also of presentation: a title and cover can promise access to the mysterious before the reader opens the book.

The commercial books are to be sold through Manutius. Garamond anticipates that his colleagues may think Manutius is indifferent to buyers, but rejects any rule that would keep the firm from serving that readership. His exclamation about selling Manutius books marks a deliberate expansion of the plan: popular occult publishing is no longer treated as separate from the group’s work, but as one of its intended products.

Garamond assigns the scholarly component to his own publishing house. The team is to review historical studies and university series, identify an expert consultant, and publish three or four books each year. Diotallevi proposes the title Hermetica, which Garamond accepts as classical and dignified. The title’s restraint contrasts with the more alluring Isis Unveiled: each series is designed for a different audience, and each signals its readership before the contents are known.

Scholarship as Lure and Filter

The academic series has a purpose beyond publishing university-level studies. Garamond expects it to attract intelligent readers who can offer suggestions and point the editors toward new subjects. At the same time, he expects the series to draw in readers like Bramanti, whom the team can then redirect toward Manutius’s more accessible books. Scholarship functions both as a genuine publishing undertaking and as a route by which popular demand can be identified and served.

This arrangement depends on a circulation of ideas between the two firms. Garamond calls the operation clean and profitable, but its cleanliness is strategic: the scholarly list gives the enterprise intellectual standing, while the popular list exploits the audience’s appetite for subjects that schoolbooks do not provide. His stated hope of offering readers faith or “a glimpse into the beyond” adds a cultural-duty rationale to the commercial one. He insists that he is no philanthropist, yet presents the project as more than a way to sell books.

The plan also reclassifies material that might otherwise be dismissed. Garamond tells Casaubon to include a little alchemy in his work on the history of metals, reasoning that gold is a metal. The instruction turns an occult association into a usable editorial connection: a subject can enter a scholarly project through its relation to an established field, then be made attractive to readers already seeking hidden knowledge.

Launch and Significance

Garamond gives the project immediate force by declaring it effective at once. He assigns the group concrete work—visiting libraries, compiling bibliographies, requesting catalogues, and finding out what is being published in other countries. His remark that valuable contributors may have been dismissed as worthless frames the new operation as a corrective to earlier editorial neglect as well as a search for material.

The launch establishes a pattern in which the boundaries between scholarship, popular belief, and publishing strategy are managed rather than resolved. Garamond does not claim that academic studies and occult best-sellers are equivalent; he plans to place them in adjacent channels and use the authority of one to help organize the market for the other. Project Hermes therefore begins as a business model and an editorial mechanism at once: it discovers, classifies, packages, and redirects the desire to find connections among hidden things.