Umberto Eco (Alessandria 1932 – Milan 2016) would have turned 90 tomorrow, January 5, and for the occasion his publishing house “La nave di Teseo”, of which he was also the founder, remembers this by republishing a text now unobtainable: Philosophers in freedom (Le Onde series, pages 224, 12 euros), in which the author demonstrated that he was able to “joke, but seriously”. This is a great surprise that the writer would certainly have appreciated together with his many loyal readers who will find this kind of pink Gronchi of literature back in the bookstore from 7 January. The publisher Elisabetta Sgarbi emphasizes that Philosophers in freedom it represented “a sensational debut in 1958 in the field, defined by Eco himself, of light non-fiction”.
A bignami of the history of philosophy
The book was published in a numbered edition of 500 copies and was signed with the Joycean pseudonym Dedalus, also due to the risk of compromising the academic career of the young Eco, who was soon destined to establish himself as a semiologist and mass media scientist. The volume was a small Bignami, one could say, of the history of philosophy in the form of a nursery rhyme, a genre very familiar since the childhood of Eco, an assiduous reader of Corriere dei Piccoli. The texts are sometimes accompanied by witty, savory vignettes by Eco (for a total of 15 drawings), in harmony with the satirical custom expressed by publications such as Candido and Il Travaso. This new edition is integrated by the ‘Writers in freedom’ section, dedicated, among others, to Proust, Joyce and Thomas Mann, one of the favorites of the author of the super translated best-seller The Name of The rose.
The huge library
Umberto Eco died in Milan in 2016: the funeral was celebrated in a secular form at the Castello Sforzesco, in front of the house. Its library, of over 40,000 volumes, has been divided. The bulk will go to Bologna, the city where Eco taught for decades at the university, where the original arrangement of the books in the Eco house will be reproduced (and there will be an online version in 3D). The oldest and most precious volumes have remained in Milan, preserved in the Braidense Library.