This article sets out to be useful to those who love books and are searching for hard-to-find editions, no longer in print or out of catalogue. I am an antiquarian bookseller who has worked for almost thirty years in Umbria and Tuscany, at the specialist antique-book fairs and above all in the town squares at the antique markets, offering, for the most part, second-hand books and out-of-print editions. It is often said that in our country people read little and indeed, figures in hand, the Istat numbers confirm this assertion. It is the view of publishers that, among the main factors behind the modest inclination to read in Italy, are the low cultural level of the population and the lack of effective school policies for reading education. At the same time (from an article in Il Fatto Quotidiano of March 2019), in the Bel Paese sixty thousand titles a year are printed, 164 a day, 8 every hour. There is a constant, frantic race for the new, and it is reckoned that 75% of publishers survive thanks to new releases. The now-saturated market does nothing but regurgitate, digest and kill off books in 90 days. Ninety days: this is the average lifespan of a book on the market. After that date, some 70% of volumes are no longer considered new. Compared with the life of a man, a book today ages a year in a day. A publisher's catalogue is gradually being emptied of meaning; it is ever rarer for books printed ten years ago to still be on the market and selling. Often it is only thanks to the presence of booksellers active in the antique markets that certain paper pearls resurface.

If the world of publishing and of new books in general appears varied and complex, no less varied and complex is the world of street booksellers, with their antique and second-hand books and their patrons, who often belong to the category of so-called "heavy" readers (those who read at least one book a month) or are downright researchers and collectors of particular editions, of unobtainable authors, of the most disparate and bizarre subjects. The distinctions between a second-hand book, an old book, an antique book and a book of antiquarian value are often misunderstood. The boundaries between one category and another are not always wholly defined and, frequently, do not match the valuation criteria of booksellers and collectors. On this point the law, in its rightful attempt to safeguard our cultural heritage, has also produced paradoxical situations such as the one that arose in August 2015 when, owing to a legislative vacuum, anyone who took abroad, as a good travelling companion, a book printed in 1964 (for instance by an American author in the hugely popular and inexpensive "Medusa" series, perhaps with a fine translation by Fernanda Pivano) risked from 1 to 4 years' imprisonment for exporting a protected antiquarian asset. Decree-Law no. 78 of 19 June 2015, converted into law on 4 August 2015, stripped the regions of the protection of the book heritage, without however indicating which body and which offices had become responsible for it; and books more than fifty years old, considered of "antiquarian value" regardless of their rarity or their market worth, ceased for a while to cross seas and pass frontiers. To establish that any given book has antiquarian value on the basis of a date, irrespective of its manifold and variable intrinsic worth, leaves many of us perplexed; but some reference parameter did, after all, have to be adopted. In the distinction between antique and modern books, too, there is a certain artificiality in fixing a precise reference date (1830), a more convincing date because, if not precisely in that very year, it was in the first half of the nineteenth century that mechanical presses were adopted, replacing the "by hand" printing techniques and revolutionising the process.

It is no coincidence that in Gutenberg's day, and for much of the sixteenth century, one spoke of the art of printing. Once the type forming the text had been assembled and the lead matrix set upon a movable carriage, one moved on to inking with large pads. Then the sheet was laid on and the carriage was run under the press. Finally, by means of a lever, the platen, that is a flat plate, was lowered, and with the pressure it transferred the ink onto the sheet, allowing it to be printed. Naturally, over the centuries significant changes were made to make the working of lever and carriage leaner and swifter, and various metals and alloys were used for the press, or for parts of it, until, at the end of the eighteenth century, the wholly cast-iron press was reached. In 1812 the first steam press was introduced, a cylindrical printing machine able, by means of an inked roller, to produce sheets printed "in series"; each single pass made it possible to print three sheets at once. Between 1812 and 1816 the rotary presses took over, culminating in double-sided printing achieved by pairing two rotary machines, specific to newspapers, capable of raising the print run to 1,600 copies of a paper an hour. The beginning of the nineteenth century thus marks the dawn of modern printing and, in the standard classification of the book, 1830 is adopted as a veritable temporal watershed: all printed publications up to 1830 are considered antique books, while later ones are termed "modern books" or "period books"'

In any case, whoever comes to the second-hand book (perhaps printed no more than a decade ago), or to the old book (which, by various criteria, may be anywhere from twenty to a hundred years old), is aware that those books have been part of the inner life of other human beings, that they have passed through other hands before reaching him. Just as it can be stimulating for some to find themselves before a virgin book fresh from the press, so it seems no less wonderful to others to find themselves before a path of words already furrowed by some stranger, who knows when and who knows where. Old books are like ships that sail through time to reach us. Beyond the content they convey, they are often a kind of black box that tells us (through an underlining, a flower left to dry between the pages, a train ticket used as a bookmark, or any other trace) something of someone and of a time now gone. The allure of a book that has had a past life and goes on living in the present takes hold of bookseller and customer alike. Between booksellers and their regular customers, then, beyond the shared premise of a love of books and of reading, there exists a kind of natural complicity founded on one and the same, even more visceral, passion.

Antique markets are often regarded from the outside with superficiality. Many people (and the phenomenon is growing, for various reasons I will not pause to explain here) look upon the market traders as wretches exposed to the elements, trying to survive by gathering here and there the objects society has discarded and seeking to resell them. Of booksellers I can speak with full knowledge, my colleagues whom I know one by one. One cannot improvise oneself into a bookseller; a mere makeshift trader cannot become one: the bookseller offers and sells something selected, which he has probably read, of which he has understanding and to which he chooses to give a new value. Besides, if it is a matter of trade, to put it in Flaiano's manner, we are the only ones offering "goods" that hold dreams of their own inside. "A book dreams. The book is the only inanimate object that can have dreams." One of the loveliest and most moving moments is the search for, and the discovery of, interesting books. Sometimes we are called into homes to look over private books and libraries in the most varied and almost always unpredictable circumstances. If on the one hand it can seem sad to scatter books that were once gathered together in a single space, on the other it is a fine thing that they should come back to life and go on to nourish new readers. Personally, I have always valued and found thrilling the peculiar situation in which we are offered an entire library assembled by one person over the course of a lifetime. As Marguerite Yourcenar said, to create libraries is like building public granaries, laying up stores against a winter of the spirit that may yet come. The body and soul of a private library, its slant, its personality, its character, often reveal more of the person behind it than one would expect. In such situations it is easy to find interesting books, those often unobtainable books we had been seeking, or those that find us before we even know we were looking for them. Many books will not catch our attention, others will be studied, others read and then let go, and from some we will never part again. Many of us booksellers have recognised ourselves, at least once, in a curious tale by Giovanni Papini, "Il libraio inverosimile", the story of a tiny bookseller who resolves, under no compulsion at all, not to sell a single book in the whole course of his life. (The tale, incidentally, was included in "Bibliofobia. Dell'odio per i libri e della loro distruzione", a title that is today a cult object among bibliophiles, printed in very few copies by a group of Italian intellectuals in the 1980s under the false name of an old clandestine printing house of the eighteenth century.)

The monthly gathering (the antique markets are held once a month in various Umbrian towns) is also an occasion for meeting and for the exchange of ideas that often spill beyond the mere sphere of printed paper and end up touching on reflections about our present and about the times we are living through, by way of a precise, recurring rhythm. In other words, this moment of shared sociability is, to all intents and purposes, a cultural event whose importance local administrations, unfortunately, often fail to grasp in full. Without, for all that, over-praising the figure of the bookseller, each of us does indeed feel that he brings something of himself to the square. In French, the expression used for the itinerant sellers of books is colportage, (also the title of a short film made years ago by a historic Perugia bookseller, Gabriele Anastasio), which to many seems nobler than "itinerant book pedlar". As for me, the sound of this word immediately conjures before my eyes the image of an itinerant bookseller I once met on an extremely crowded train in southern India. The man struck me at once by the discreet, courteous manner with which, passing from carriage to carriage, he moved among the people, who in their turn looked at him with respect; he "carried on his neck", precisely, a heavy stack of books, the "weight" of culture. The force and the poetry of that image move me still.

Here below are the places the booksellers frequent each month in Umbria, and their details:

Perugia: Last Sunday of every month, and the Saturday before, in the historic centre (Piazza Italia, Giardini Carducci, Logge della prefettura)

Pissignano: First Sunday of every month (near the Fonti del Clitunno)

Spoleto: Second Sunday of the month, in the historic centre

Terni: Second Sunday of the month, and the Saturday before, in the historic centre

Todi: Second Sunday of the month (near the Temple of Santa Maria della Consolazione)

Città di Castello: Third Sunday of the month, in the historic centre (Piazza Matteotti and Palazzo Bufalini)

Metello Bartoli (present in Perugia)

Info: metello.bartoli@gmail.com

Vasco Bernardini (present in Perugia, Pissignano, Spoleto / Gubbio, Città di Castello)

Info: scudierojohn@yahoo.it

Simone Signorini (present in Perugia, Pissignano, Todi)

Info: simone.signorini@tiscali.it

Maurizio Caprioli (present in Perugia)

Info: mauro.cap56@gmail.com

Adriano Battisti (present in Terni)

Info: adrianolibri@virgilio.it

Postscript by Vasco Bernardini

Crime Story

Madame Sphera and the Book climbed the stairs of the

boarding house; they waited for the cleaning woman

to leave the room and sat down on the bed to

listen to the rain. But when the Book fell asleep,

Madame Sphera could not resist, and in an instant

she seduced it. The Book put up a brief resistance, in a

slow agony of open pages, then slipped into a

familiar ending, with no memory left.

Early in the morning the Book paid the bill,

went out into the street and hailed a taxi. It was still raining when

it stepped down into the great square. On foot it walked the last

stretch to the library and went in.

It strode briskly along the hall of the lost

books, where the dramas of one night crossed

with the tales of sailors. It paused a moment to catch its

breath, then with effort clambered to the topmost

shelf.

– So how did it go? ..

– Well, brothers, I have brought you the newspaper, read it,

it is on the front page.

"Madame Sphera, well-known devourer of crime novels, found dead

in a hotel room"

– Not bad for a beginner, wouldn't you say?