Direct Contacts and Delegation: the Shifting Strategies of Arnoldo Mondadori

Having identified the social agents handling translation rights between the turn of the century and the early 1930s, this and the following chapters focus on the far-reaching activity of two leading companies in their respective spheres, the publishing house Mondadori and the ALI. With regard to the former, this chapter positions the firm within the Milanese publishing milieu, while collating a set of readers’ reports on works by English-speaking writers to chart providers of translation rights and the relation between rights availability and the publisher’s decision-making process. Furthermore, it combines the survey of Mondadori’s, Helicon’s, and ALI’s records to investigate the role of the agencies in the 1930s. Finally, it introduces Lorenzo Montano to evaluate the extent of the results achieved by this representative in London in the early 1940s. Through the publisher’s records, the chapter demonstrates that the firm’s strategy with regard to translation rights went through three distinct phases: an attempt to directly approach foreign authors and publishers in the early 1920s, the delegation of negotiations to Italian literary agents in the 1930s, and the commitment to establishing new commercial relations in the 1940s.