Fontamara

London: Jonathan Cape, 1942. Softcover. Near Fine. Second edition (first trade edition) in Italian. 12mo. 164pp. Printed wrappers with yapped edges. Owner name (Harold D. Gunn) inside cover. Light toning and some edgewear, a near fine copy of a relatively delicate, wartime-printed volume. The Italian author's famous anti-Fascist novel, written while a refugee in Switzerland, and with a fascinating publishing history.

*Fontamara* was first published in the spring of 1933 (in German, in Zurich), and first published in Italian (in Paris), later the same year, in a limited edition printed at Silone's own expense. Robert Gordon, Oxford Fellow and editor of the 1994 Everyman edition, states in his "Note on the Text," that the edition offered here was published in London in 1942 without Silone's permission. It was published in an edition of 22,000 copies, and Gordon writes that it was full of "typographical errors and nonsensical mutilations." The book was distributed free to Italian prisoners of war, and possibly (according to another source) carried by Allied troops into Italy. The Cape edition of 1942 was, then, the second edition of the novel in the author's native language, and "the first opportunity for *Fontamara* to be distributed among Italians in their own language," apparently as a piece of anti-Fascist literary propaganda. By this time, Silone's rural novel was famous seemingly everywhere *except* in his home country.

From the lower wrapper of this edition (translated): "After [Italians] have read this wonderful story... they will understand why, of all the books released in the world during his dictatorship, *Fontamara* was the one that Mussolini feared most." A curious, unauthorized, and uncommon edition of a classic Italian, and anti-Fascist, novel. We note only three holdings in the U.S. (LOC, UCLA, U. Dayton).