In an age of flattening of categories, of easy access to a supposed digitized universal library (in truth, fragmentary and chaotic), the publisher tends to be seen as an unnecessary intermediary between the writer and the reader. This brief volume of Roberto Calasso comes to refute point by point that and other serious errors of the adalides of immediacy, speed and monetary performance as absolute categories. Supported by his exceptional situation, at the crossroads between the great publisher-he has for many years been a prestigious Italian label such as Adelphi, an international reference- and the writer of enormous culture and critical acuteness - to mention only his latest works, he has written Books already classic on Kafka, Baudelaire, Tiepolo and on the Hindu mythology (all published by Anagrama) -, Calasso adopts a lucid and committed position, argued and endorsed by its own trajectory. By glossing the figure of the great European and American publishers of the twentieth century, Calasso shows the decisive importance that labels like Gallimard, Einaudi, Suhrkamp or Farrar, Straus & Giroux have had in the formation of a criterion and a reading public, in the ordering And the separation of the grain from the straw as far as literature is concerned. Calasso argues his idea of ​​"publishing as a literary genre": an editor of the lineage to which he belongs is a searcher for "unique books", is someone who writes, with the books he publishes, the best book of all: his Catalog, which is both his autobiography. Therefore, faced with the idea of ​​those who want to handle publishing as an industry, this book shows, at the same time with fineness and force, the importance of the editor who defends and cultivates his brand. Without which everything is flattened into one category: that of easy entertainment and quick forgetfulness. Calasso's journey is not a minor attraction for his own memory, for the great personalities he dealt with, not only in the editorial sphere, but also, of course, in the literary sphere; In this respect, the portrait he draws here, for example, from Thomas Bernhard is insurmountable. The publisher's mark can be read as a continuation of A Hundred Letters to an Unknown, the book with which, through the coverback texts written for Adelphi's books, Calasso inaugurated his memoirs as editor. The brand of the publisher completes the trajectory of an exceptional trajectory, that of a race that has shaped our sensibility and our culture, and which now more than ever needs our recognition.