Garamond Press offices

Garamond Press offices are where Casaubon first meets Jacopo Belbo and where the novel makes publishing’s material machinery visible: manuscripts crowd an old desk, routine academic books fund a stable business, and later a new occult series is promoted through manufactured anticipation. The offices are not merely a backdrop to editorial work. They are the point at which Casaubon enters Belbo’s world, and from which the commercial logic behind Project Hermes begins to emerge.

Setting and First Visit

The offices occupy Number 1, Via Sincere Renato, in a building whose approach feels more like an accumulated workplace than a polished publishing house. A dusty passage opens toward a courtyard and a rope-maker’s shop; an industrial-looking elevator shudders and jerks, prompting Casaubon to abandon it and climb two flights of almost circular wooden stairs. A plate on the landing identifies Garamond Press. Inside, there is no switchboard or receptionist, although a person in a small outer office can see anyone entering the lobby. The setting’s worn, makeshift character is established before Casaubon reaches the editorial room.

The employee who intercepts him speaks an Italian so reduced in its vowels that it initially seems to be a foreign language. When Casaubon asks for Belbo, she leads him down a corridor to an office at the back. There Belbo welcomes him and seats him opposite an old desk, with manuscripts piled high upon it and along the walls. The meeting gives Casaubon a literal place in the crowded working environment: not an impressive institutional reception, but a desk-to-desk conversation amid papers that have accumulated faster than they can be cleared.

Editorial Work and the Manuscript Piles

The office’s disorder belongs to a publishing operation that is otherwise organized around predictable work. Belbo explains that the production staff have a room across the hall and that Diotallevi works next door on reference books and large projects, whose preparation takes a long time but whose sales life is also long. Belbo’s own responsibility is university editions. These are commonly institute publications or conference proceedings, with a beginner’s professor supplying a preface, the author correcting proofs and checking notes, and no royalties paid to the author. Adoption as a textbook can move a few thousand copies over several years, covering costs without exposing the publisher to much risk.

That stable academic list is only one part of the business. Garamond Press also pays to publish some books, usually translations by prestigious authors, to give the catalogue distinction. And manuscripts left at the door must be read even though few prove publishable. The office therefore holds together two different kinds of editorial labor: a routine system whose costs and sales are comparatively foreseeable, and an open-ended intake of submissions whose value cannot be known in advance. The piles around Belbo’s desk make that latter uncertainty visible.

Casaubon sees the physical consequence when Belbo searches for a manuscript about the Templars. Trying to extract a fake-leather folder from the middle of a stack without disturbing the others, Belbo brings part of the pile crashing to the floor. The folder concerns the familiar legend that knights escaped the arrest of the Templars in a hay wain, fled to Scotland, and joined a Masonic lodge. Belbo dismisses the claim as a repeatedly copied story without foundation. In this scene, the manuscript’s presence is not evidence of the publisher’s endorsement: the office receives and reads such material, while Belbo’s response distinguishes editorial attention from belief in what a submission asserts.

Manutius and the Self-Financing Author

The offices also provide the practical setting for a more predatory publishing model. In Belbo’s account, Manutius is a small vanity press staffed by Garamond, Signora Grazia, a bookkeeper in a back cubbyhole, and Luciano, a disabled shipping clerk working in a large half-basement storeroom. Luciano has one arm and, Belbo suspects, packs books with his teeth. The limitation is built into the business model: unlike a conventional publisher shipping to booksellers, Manutius ships only to the authors who have paid to publish. Its commercial priority is keeping those authors loyal, not reaching readers.

Belbo describes how Garamond converts an aspiring writer’s desire for recognition into a sales proposition. An author may be told that the manuscript is sublime and worthy of a literary prize, while also hearing that a small print run is commercially sensible. The imagined buyer is not an anonymous reading public but the author’s own circle—former classmates, bank managers, fellow teachers, and others whose attention the writer hopes to command. When Garamond suggests that the author help underwrite the costs, the author’s longing to see the work in print can make a costly offer seem like an opportunity rather than a warning.

The standard contract gives that transaction its less romantic terms. Its ten pages of clauses in eight-point type grant the publisher broad subsidiary rights, including foreign, dramatic, broadcast, film, and abridgment rights, and place disputes in Milan courts. The apparent promise of as many as ten thousand copies is not matched by any stated minimum print run, while the author’s payment is independent of the number actually printed. Unsold copies may be pulped after a year unless the author buys them at half the list price. The launch can appear lavish, with press releases, biographical material, and critical essays; the actual plan described for a title is one thousand copies, only three hundred and fifty bound, with a limited number reaching shops, provincial magazines, or newspapers. The office’s publishing apparatus thus manufactures the appearance of public recognition while shifting the cost and risk onto the writer.

Project Hermes and Manufactured Demand

The contrast between the routine university list and Manutius’s author-funded business sharpens when Garamond proposes Project Hermes. He recognizes a market for books on Hermetic subjects, where readers can find writers who profess belief alongside writers who dismiss religion, provided both address the occult. He presents the venture as commercially promising and also gives it a cultural rationale: in what he regards as dark times, the press can offer readers faith or a glimpse beyond ordinary knowledge. Belbo’s joke about a “golden branch” passes over Garamond’s head; Garamond is focused on the gold in the opportunity.

The proposal quickly becomes practical. While Casaubon spends late hours in libraries looking for illustrations about metals, Manutius is already preparing the new line. Two months later, a magazine carries an article by Dr. Moebius, a pseudonym used by Belbo, announcing the occult revival and the planned “Isis Unveiled” series. Garamond then writes to reviews of Hermeticism, astrology, tarot, and UFOlogy under different names, asking for information about the series. When their editors call, he withholds the first titles while implying that they are already in preparation. The sequence turns publicity into a feedback loop: the press plants the news, occult periodicals inquire about it, and their inquiries help make the still-emerging series seem like an established subject of attention.

Garamond explains the tactic with a flower-and-bees image. The accompanying four-page glossy flier gives the series a visual identity: a golden seal on black, described as the Pentacle of Solomon, framed by interwoven swastikas that Garamond insists are sunward-facing Asian symbols rather than Nazi emblems. Its language promises that there are more things in heaven and earth and invokes knowledge from Egypt, Chaldea, and Tibet. In the offices, the distinction between editorial selection and market creation becomes harder to maintain: Project Hermes is not simply a response to an existing readership, but a coordinated attempt to summon one by packaging occult learning as a new cultural need.