Abstract

This article examines the letters exchanged between Gianfranco Contini and his publisher Giulio Einaudi by piecing together their relationship from the late Thirties (from the edition of Dante’s Rime) to the end of the Eighties (Contini died in 1990). The core of the correspondence is the “Nuova Raccolta di classici italiani annotatiµ, the collection under the direction of Contini from 1953 till his death. The scholar and the publisher did not always agree on the choice of the texts in that Contini selected rare and singular literary works while Einaudi preferred the most famous classics of Italian literature. Contini’s influence on the Einaudi publishing house was also remarkable in the field of linguistics, but the project of a new collection did not take off as proved by important documents.