Garamond

Garamond, a Milan publisher, is both a practitioner of calculated commercial publishing and the source of a rule that helps make the novel’s invented conspiracy credible. Through Manutius, he sells publication to authors who finance their own books; through Project Hermes, he converts the public appetite for occult subjects into a new series. His methods join commercial calculation to a larger irony: the same logic of repetition and authority that markets books helps the researchers assemble a Plan that readers mistake for a real tradition.

Publishing and Manutius

Garamond divides his work between conventional university editions and books that can enlarge a publisher’s cultural standing. University publications, institute books, and conference proceedings are comparatively safe: an author’s professor supplies a preface, the author checks proofs and references without receiving royalties, and a few thousand textbook sales over several years cover expenses. Garamond describes this business as free of editorial, academic, and financial surprises. He also publishes translations of prestigious authors at his own expense to add distinction to the catalog, and accepts unsolicited manuscripts for reading even though few prove publishable.

Manutius operates on a different principle. It is a vanity press for self-financing authors, with high earnings and minimal overhead. Its four-person staff consists of Garamond, Signora Grazia, a bookkeeper, and Luciano, a disabled shipping clerk who packs books in the half-basement storeroom with one arm. Unlike an ordinary publisher, Manutius ships its books to the authors rather than to booksellers. The readership is not its central concern: the business depends on keeping authors loyal.

Garamond’s imagined recruitment of the aspiring poet Adeodato Lampustri shows how that loyalty is cultivated. He first flatters the manuscript, claiming that readers’ reports were favorable and that he spent a sleepless night studying it. He then presents commercial caution as a mark of professional judgment: the book may be ahead of its time, he says, and likely to sell no more than two thousand or twenty-five hundred copies. Faced with the prospect of disappointing the acquaintances who know he has submitted a manuscript to a major Milan publisher, the author is primed to pay for publication himself.

The contract turns that hope into a financial trap. Its ten pages of small print cover foreign and subsidiary rights, adaptations, broadcasts, film, Braille editions, liability, and disputes to be settled in Milan. The author may overlook that the stated maximum print run of ten thousand has no minimum, that his payment is independent of the actual run, and that unsold copies can be pulped after a year unless he buys them at half price. The lavish-sounding launch promises press releases and promotion, but the actual plan is to print one thousand copies and bind only three hundred and fifty. Two hundred go to the author; small allotments go to associated shops, provincial magazines, and newspapers, and leftover copies may later be donated to hospitals or prisons. The gap between the imagined literary debut and the limited distribution is built into the business model.

Project Hermes and the occult market

Garamond’s commercial instincts also shape Project Hermes. Seeing that publishers can sell both authors who believe in occult doctrines and authors who dismiss them, he identifies the broad category as Hermeticism and proposes a new publishing branch. He presents the enterprise partly as a cultural duty—a chance to offer readers faith or a glimpse beyond ordinary knowledge—but also recognizes its profit potential. The occult market can be reached by offering material that contradicts what readers encounter in school.

The project moves quickly from proposal to campaign. Belbo writes an article under the pseudonym Dr. Moebius announcing Manutius’s intended series, Isis Unveiled, and receives his first bonus from Project Hermes. Garamond then writes to reviews of Hermeticism, astrology, tarot, and UFOlogy, adopting different names to request information about the new series. When the editors call the publisher, he cultivates secrecy, saying that the first ten titles cannot yet be revealed although they are in preparation. The staged mystery alerts the occultist press and helps create anticipation for a list not yet disclosed.

Garamond makes the promotional strategy explicit with the image of a flower attracting bees. A four-page glossy flyer gives the series a unified visual identity: a golden seal he identifies as Solomon’s Pentacle against black, framed by interwoven swastikas that he hastens to distinguish as Asian rather than Nazi. Its language promises forgotten knowledge from Egypt, Chaldea, and Tibet, while presenting Manutius as serving culture and offering truths deeper than those supplied by science. The packaging fuses scholarly appearance, exotic suggestion, and commercial invitation.

The rule behind the Plan

Garamond’s influence reaches beyond publishing practice. In the narrator’s retrospective account, the rule that books for the Diabolicals must not innovate but repeat what has already been said is identified as Garamond’s idea. Repetition lends borrowed claims the authority of Tradition; apparent corroboration can make familiar fragments seem to confirm one another. The three researchers apply that principle when they assemble their Plan from existing material rather than inventing its component myths.

The contrast with Colonel Ardenti clarifies the method. Ardenti, too, had arranged existing pieces, but his arrangement was clumsy and he possessed fewer pieces. The researchers believe they have assembled a more persuasive pattern; the people they address recognize fragments of their own confused mythologies in it and accept those fragments as parts of the supposed Plan. Garamond’s publishing rule thus becomes a mechanism of belief: a nonexistent design can seem authoritative when it is composed of material already familiar to its audience.

The narrator draws the consequence sharply. Once people believe in an invented Plan and begin to act on it, the Plan acquires existence through their actions. Garamond’s business model and the researchers’ deception are not identical, but both depend on recognizing what an audience wants, presenting it in a compelling form, and drawing authority from what already circulates. The publisher who teaches them the power of repetition helps explain how a fabricated pattern can escape its makers and become consequential in the world.

Absence and aftermath

Late in the narrative, Gudrun tells the narrator by telephone that Diotallevi died on Saturday night at midnight. At his funeral that morning, Garamond is absent; Gudrun says he is out of the country. The only people she names as present from the publishing office are herself, Grazia, and Luciano, alongside an unfamiliar bearded man dressed in black. The report places Garamond’s absence against the death of a colleague and the narrator’s own distance from the funeral, without explaining where Garamond has gone or what he knows.