Publishers’ News Bulletins in the Twenty Century Italy. The Publishers’ Bibliography between Information and Advertising

Abstract

The paper is a first attempt to identify, list and analyze a bibliographic material that has not yet been studied, on which systematic investigations have not been carried out and for which there are also problems related to the scarcity of documentation preserved in our libraries (as for the publishers catalogues). This is the reason why the search for primary sources has necessarily expanded into the publishers’ archives, literary archives and private collections. The bibliographic evidence we are dealing with here, limited to the Twenty Century Italy, is that of publishers’ news bulletins or publishers’ bibliographic journals. First of all, the paper deals with a definition of the subject. Then, we managed to identify about twenty bulletins/journals that fall into our field. Of each of these bulletins/journals we provide a description for the purpose of a first survey of the historical, cultural and social role played by them in the publishing and bibliographic field. There is also a first attempt to identify some parameters and to classify between “open” and “closed” journals.