Project Hermes

Project Hermes is Signor Garamond’s plan to make the occult a coordinated publishing business, linking the scholarly authority of Garamond’s operation to Manutius’s self-financing books. Its significance lies in the way it converts a diffuse interest in Hermetic subjects into a market: academic study supplies legitimacy and attracts attention, while publicity and commercial publishing channel that attention toward authors who will pay to see their work in print.

Publishing Before Project Hermes

The plan grows out of two distinct publishing practices. At Garamond, university editions generally involved institute publications or conference proceedings. A beginner’s professor might provide a preface; the author corrected proofs and checked quotations and footnotes, received no royalties, and the textbook sold a few thousand copies over several years. The model was deliberately predictable: the books’ expenses were covered without surprises or losses. The firm also took on prestige translations at its own expense to give the catalog distinction, and read unsolicited manuscripts left at its door, even though few were publishable.

Manutius operated on a different logic. It was a vanity press built around self-financing authors, with high earnings and very low overhead. Its four-person staff consisted of Garamond, Signora Grazia, a bookkeeper, and Luciano, a disabled shipping clerk who packed books in the half-basement storeroom. Unlike an ordinary publisher, Manutius shipped books only to their authors; it was not interested in readers so much as keeping authors loyal. The contrast between a low-risk academic list and a press funded by writers themselves gave Garamond the components for Project Hermes.

A Market for Hermetic Subjects

Garamond’s immediate opportunity was the presence of occult material in respectable bookshops as well as specialist ones. Hermetic studies stood beside books by writers such as Bramanti, though academic authors and occult enthusiasts might never have met. Readers could treat both as addressing the same interests, moving freely among the Templars, cabala, lotteries, and tea leaves. Garamond saw this broad, indiscriminate appetite as a large potential audience, and described an editorial venture that could also offer readers a glimpse beyond what conventional science provided.

The proposed structure deliberately served two markets. Manutius would publish the occult-facing series, while Garamond would establish an academic series of three or four books a year, drawing on historical studies and university lists to identify an expert consultant. Diotallevi suggested the title Hermetica, which Garamond judged classical and dignified. The scholarly books were not simply a separate product line: they would attract intelligent readers, elicit suggestions and new directions, and lend credibility to the operation. They could also draw less scholarly writers toward Manutius, where their manuscripts could become self-financed books. Garamond described the two firms as strengthening the flow of ideas between them; commercially, the arrangement also made scholarship a lure for the paid-publishing branch.

The proposed occult series needed a title that suggested more than it stated. Casaubon offered Isis Unveiled, which Garamond accepted for its Egyptian and pyramidal associations and its promise of a suitably dark, magical appearance. For the academic line, Hermetica supplied the contrasting tone: direct but not picturesque, learned rather than sensational. The two titles expressed the project’s double address, offering the aura of occult revelation alongside the decorum of scholarship.

From Proposal to Publicity

Project Hermes became operational faster than Casaubon expected. While he stayed late in libraries researching illustrations about metals, activity was already underway at Manutius. Two months after the proposal, Belbo’s office held a fresh issue of The Italic Parnassus with an article titled “The Rebirth of Occultism.” Belbo wrote it under the pseudonym Dr. Moebius, presenting the occult sciences as undergoing a modern renaissance and announcing Manutius’s new series, Isis Unveiled. The article also earned him his first bonus from the project, making the venture’s commercial incentive tangible from its earliest publicity.

Garamond amplified the announcement by writing under different names to reviews concerned with Hermeticism, astrology, tarot, and UFOlogy, asking about the new series. When editors called Manutius for details, he acted as though the titles remained secret, saying he could not yet reveal the first ten, though they were in preparation. The feigned withholding generated curiosity and alerted the occultist world to the series. The campaign did not merely respond to an existing readership: it coordinated signals that helped make that readership aware of a forthcoming supply of books.

The promotional flier made the strategy visible. It was four pages on glossy paper, with a black cover design bearing a golden seal Garamond identified as Solomon’s Pentacle, framed by interwoven swastikas. He stressed that these were Asian swastikas, not Nazi ones. Above the projected title appeared the fragment “There are more things in heaven and earth...” The flier praised Manutius as serving culture and promised access to deeper and more luminous truths than science could offer, invoking Egypt, Chaldea, and Tibet. Its imagery and language packaged the books as both cultural goods and gateways to forbidden or forgotten knowledge.

The Self-Financing Mechanism

The business model behind Manutius clarifies what the project’s promise meant for authors. Garamond’s imagined pitch to a self-financing author begins with praise: the manuscript is called sublime and prize-worthy, and the publisher claims to have spent a night reading it. The subsequent hesitation about sales gives the author a reason to offer money. In the projected exchange, the writer’s intimate audience consists of familiar faces—schoolmates, bank managers, fellow teachers, retired colonels, and even people who may not care about the work. The prospect of disappointing those people helps turn the author’s ambition into a willingness to underwrite publication.

The contract then formalizes the risk in Manutius’s favor. A standard ten-page document in tiny type covered foreign and subsidiary rights, dramatizations, radio and television serialization, film rights, Braille editions, abridgments, libel guarantees, and disputes in Milan courts. Its maximum print run was 10,000, but it stipulated no minimum; the author’s payment did not depend on the print run, which was settled only verbally. Most consequentially, Manutius could pulp unsold copies after a year unless the author bought them at half the list price. The writer who believed the book would reach a wide public thus signed away rights and accepted costs without a contractual guarantee of how many copies would actually be printed.

The advertised scale also differed from the practical one. A lavish launch might include ten-page press releases containing a biography and critical essays, while the actual printing was 1,000 copies, only 350 of them bound. Two hundred copies went to the author; roughly 50 went to minor or associated bookshops, 50 to provincial magazines, and about 30 to newspapers, with remaining copies later donated to hospitals or prisons. The planned commercial edition could therefore create the appearance of a major launch while placing a small number of bound books into circulation. Project Hermes joined this machinery to a subject area with strong symbolic appeal, using scholarly respectability, occult promise, and carefully managed publicity to make a paid-publication business look like a cultural mission.