Publishers’ Agencies: Helicon, Ulisse, and the New York Branch of Einaudi

The 1930s and early 1940s represented the peak of the agents’ mediation with regard to translation rights of British and US works. Literary agents were not only able to channel a great volume of translation rights to the printing industry; they also devised strategies that could accommodate the specificities of interwar publishing, both in financial and political terms. As the outbreak of the Second World War brought about a period of stalemate for copyright negotiations, publishers such as Mondadori, Einaudi, and Bompiani tackled the adversities of the conflict by devising a tool that could keep literary imports alive: the publishers’ agency. After addressing the re-establishment of Helicon and Mondadori’s efforts during his Swiss residency, this chapter zooms in on the work of Mario Einaudi in New York on behalf of his brother’s publishing house. Finally, it collates the data available on Bompiani’s Ulisse to investigate its twofold nature as literary and theatrical agency. While differing in terms of corporate structure and range of activities, these enterprises, specifically created to benefit a single publishing firm, only partially reached their goals, due to the lack of internal managerial coordination and coherent publishing strategies. This, combined with the general distrust provoked by one-sided activities on both the Italian and international publishing scene, led to the demise of publishers’ agencies in the late 1940s.