Raimondo Di Maio: cursed Amazon – Giuseppe Rizzo

The street of universities, booksellers and copy shops rattles with cars, motorcycles and bicycles, while pedestrians cross the narrow sidewalks. A strip of shadow cuts out a corner of calm at number 63, where a second-hand book stall welcomes you to the workshop of the builder of a modern and tiny Noah’s ark, the Dante & Descartes bookshop.

Raimondo Di Maio is grappling with five thousand volumes of Roman law just bought: “I had arranged everything for the inauguration of this new headquarters, but it is already ‘nu brothel’ e pazz’”.

Di Maio – 64 years old, gray hair, kind eyes and small physique – moves around the forty square meters of his library arranging, stroking and pointing to books everywhere: on the shelves; in the boxes on the ground; beside, above and below the box; on chairs, stools and every available surface. “In total, here and in three repositories, I keep a hundred thousand volumes,” he says. It is the treasure of almost forty years of career as an independent bookseller and publisher that over time has changed three locations, but always in via di Mezzocannone.

“There used to be a jewelry shop here, but it has closed down,” he says. The owner left him a safe, which Di Maio wants to transform into “the smallest library in the world“, where he can keep his “little giants”: thirty-second books, a few centimeters on each side, that fit in the palm of one hand. “I have twenty cases, three thousand volumes. I exhibited them in Warsaw and Naples, I had to go to Brera, but then the pandemic broke out ”.

They keep company with the rare, new and university volumes that he has been selling since 1984, the year the bookstore was opened, but they occupy a special place in his life: “They are foundlings, hardly ever do junk dealers or people who dispose of entire libraries have more of one or two. Then I take them and give them a new life. I myself publish books in this format. These are the toys I didn’t have as a child ”.

It is the only moment in which Di Maio’s voice is veiled with bitterness. The books in 32nd are fun, but they also tell a piece of his life. Growing up with his mother and two brothers, Di Maio never knew his father and spent a long time in the canteen of proletarian children opened by Lotta continues: “I was born in a low and I’m not ashamed, politicians should be ashamed of low that allowed them “.

From an adolescence as a street urchin who brought coffee home “to their gentlemen of the bourgeoisie” and cleaned “the toilets of the bars with such stinking rags” that still populate his nightmares, Di Maio managed to get out thanks to a difficult encounter imagine today: “I was a poor Christ, the idea and the Communist Party saved me”.

He tells me how it went to the Santa Chiara tavern, a small place with a few wooden tables and chairs in the historic center. The menu offers a lot of fish but Di Maio prefers pasta with potatoes and provola which reminds him of the flavors of him when he was little.

“There was a section of the Communist Party with a billiard table that attracted a lot of kids”, he smiles, “from the son of the greengrocer, one of those who were better off, to the offspring of the bourgeoisie, to the proletarians and marginals like me. There was an incredible air, we exchanged books and advice. During the day I worked and at night I read i Prison notebooks by Antonio Gramsci. And to think that my first reading, like that of many in Naples, was the collection of Totò’s poems, ‘A level”.

Di Maio says that in his house, as in many others, “a paper did not fly”, that is, no books or newspapers were turned over. But Totò’s poems had reached everyone. “As children we recited them from memory and then the adults gave us the mallet, some quick. Pirate versions were found in every corner of the city. At one point someone had even recorded Totò reading them, putting everything on disk and selling the copies illegally. It was a kind of audio book, which people also listened to on the street ”.

With Gramsci it went differently: “When I read it I didn’t understand much, I was too young, but there was a method and a vision that changed me”. Di Maio managed to graduate from night school, while earning a living working in pizzerias and restaurants in Milan, Bologna, France and Germany. When he returned to Naples he enrolled at the university: “Three exams from my degree in philosophy I gave up everything to found the bookshop together with two colleagues. I had put the savings there, they had the family money. At seven I opened and cleaned, they slept. In the end they quarreled and I was left alone ”.

In almost forty years he has tried to “raise up some boys, but it didn’t work out”. His son followed his path: “Giancarlo opened a Dante & Descartes office in Piazza Del Gesù and he’s much better than me”.

For his birth in 1988, Di Maio printed his first book, and since then he has made three hundred. From Jorge Luis Borges to Erri De Luca, passing through Domenico Rea and Louise Glück, the American poet who in 2020 won the Nobel Prize for literature. Until that moment Di Maio was the only one in Italy to have one of his books in the catalog.

“José Vicente Quirante Rives, former director of the Cervantes Institute in Naples, publisher and great friend, convinced me to publish Averno,” he says. “Before the news of the Nobel I had managed to sell seventy copies with blood in my eyes. Then the newspapers and TVs did the circus and people lined up in front of the bookstore because they wanted a piece of Nobel from me ”, he jokes. “The top stopped after twenty days, when the Assayer bought the rights to Glück’s works. But it seems to me that the interest in this great author did not last long. Capitalism, even in publishing, consumes everything quickly ”.

To resist these mechanisms, Di Maio chooses no more than ten titles a month: “I must have read them so as not to suggest crap to my clients”. In addition, he has his own contact list to which he writes when he gets his hands on a rarity: “I work with poverty, I buy and sell old books, I hit the markets and the broken houses. This is why I know many junk dealers. During the lockdown they could not work and some of them sold the kit, the best pieces. So I managed to buy three unobtainable works by Bruno Munari that I am selling to an American scholar ”. Like other times, she put the headlines on eBay: “And never on Amazon, damn it. Jeff Bezos has ruined the publishing industry and with his predatory spirit he is destroying cities, killing off trade ”.

Booksellers like him also pay the costs: “Until a few years ago there were about a hundred bookshops in Naples, today we can count on the fingers of one hand and to survive we have to roll up our sleeves”. During the lockdown he had to reinvent himself: “I was a book smuggler. We had published a beautiful text by Walter Benjamin, Porous Naples, which had had a good review on the Friday of the Republic. Orders began to arrive: we sent some with Giancarlo, but we delivered many secretly here in Naples, riding a bicycle and wearing gloves and a mask. Since then many have asked us to continue with home deliveries and we enjoy doing it “.

I point out to him that he used to bring coffee to people’s homes, now books. He smiles and says she hadn’t thought of it.