1The story I want to tell about has one beginning, 1972, but it has at least two endings. The first ending is chronological and refers to the date when the Tantibambini series, directed by Bruno Munari for the publisher Einaudi, stopped production in 1978; the second is a sort of open ending, because after the series stopped, a new adventure came to life years after.

2Before going into the details, a quick look at the historical and cultural background is necessary.

3In the post-war period, thanks to technical and cultural innovations, the Italian publishing industry realized that a stronger corporate image and a specific graphic imprint for each project were pivotal to making them stand out among a more and more crowded and varied field. Publishers’ strategies had two main goals: to modernize their production and to better define their company’s profile. The old publishing houses started to change their approach, either with their catalogue, or their identity, in order to face the challenges of the growing mass market. The newer publishing houses promoted themselves through innovative graphic design.

6Regarding the content of these books, Pino Boero and Carmine De Luca wrote:

• 4 Ibid., pp. 242-243.

We can distinguish two main tendencies: a progressive, libertarian, democratic, against a conservative and moralistic one. Stories from the latter issue from conformist educational intents and are made of artificial sentiment, they correspond to Catholic books and are supported by the conservative wing of pedagogical studies. Whereas the other tendency, not only succeeds in getting rid of the Nineteenth-century traditional pathos and edifying moral, it also expresses the wish to deal with the most urgent and current topics with children and teen agers, with no more need of disguise and pedagogical duplicity⁴.

8Einaudi, on the other hand, published books and series that pointed to a new way of thinking about children’s literature for a broad audience, with titles such as La grammatica della fantasia by Gianni Rodari, Guardare le figure by Antonio Faeti and the Tantibambini series, directed by Bruno Munari.

9Following the national education reform that stipulated the introduction of Italian or Foreign modern fiction teaching in secondary schools, some publishers began to offer series dedicated to producing editions of classic works of literature with study notes. However, some teachers seemed to be especially devoted to this cause of literature, and struggled against what they saw as an old-fashioned ministry and an outdated policy, and tried to promote a different approach to education, that relied instead on innovative texts that ended up becoming very successful and breaking with the general conformism.

11Mario Lodi believed that children do not belong to their parents, to their school or to their country. When they’re born, they have to be granted a right first of all, the right to happiness:

• 7 Lodi Mario, Cominciare dal bambino. Scritti didattici, pedagogici e teorici, Turin, Piccola Bibliot (...)

The free man is no one’s property and does not own anyone. Many free men together can become astonishingly strong; they can change the world and the society they live in. To let this power run wild, we have to start by children, who belong to everyone and are defenseless. The rest will come, since if we set children free, we can break whatever chain⁷.

12Keeping this cultural context in mind, we can now go deeper into the editorial aspect of my research.

• 8 Rauch Andrea, Il mondo come Design e rappresentazione, Milan, Usher arte, 2009.

During one of our editorial meetings, I realized that everybody was mixing up picture books with young adult fiction. I said it and Giulio Einaudi seized the moment – Why don’t you do it yourself, a picture books series? – So, I did it.⁸

14Together with Oreste Molina, who was head of the graphic design department at Einaudi, Munari conceived a cutting-edge template design: books that were almost square at 23x24 cm; no hardcover, which kept production costs low; every cover had an oval colour spot for the author’s and illustrator’s names, and the title written in a different type consistent with the book content, logotype and, especially, the first lines of the story. This was totally new.

15The books were staple bound, and because there was no space between cover and back cover, the spine was moved to the left side of the cover, with the serial number, title and series. The result was a high quality cheap product: in the first years, the price ranged from 300 Lire (around € 0,15), for a 16-pages book, to 500 or 600 Lire, for double number of pages, and only reaching up to 1.000 or 2.000 Lire (around € 0,50 and € 1,00) in the final years.

16Munari used to say that:

• 10 Munari Bruno, “Il design e i mercati rionali”, Le Arti, n°6, 1975, p. 36.

Children like these books, they can buy them at stationers’, they are cheap and will soon be on sale in local markets too… This is no utopia, this is a true social service.¹⁰

17“Social service” and political intent, indeed, were made clear on the back cover descriptions of the collection. Munari would write all the back covers, and he took care of the paratextual information too. Some of them are quoted below, as examples of Munari’s method whereby the designer became a co-author and had to transmit the meaning of the project as a whole.

18In the first book, L’uccellino Tic Tic, with illustrations by Emanuele Luzzati and text by E. Poi, he wrote:

Simple tales and stories where we find no fairies, no witches, no luxurious castles, no handsome princes, no mysterious wizards, for a new generation of human beings who are to refuse inhibition, submission, and should be free and aware of their power.

19We can tell by these words that the 1968 protests were not so long ago.
A few lines later the author introduced himself:

E. Poi has Norwegian origins but he was born in Italy to a foreign mother and an indigenous father. He lives with his Belgian sister at the border between Portugal and Australia. He is married to a Neapolitan woman from New York and they have many children.

21Among other interesting texts of this kind was the one included in I fratellini, a text from 1972, written by primary school pupils from the village of Nibionno, in Northern Italy, together with their teacher, Mariangela Donghi.

22They analyzed reality prior to the experience of making a movie:

Simple tales and stories where we find no fairies nor witches, no luxurious castles nor handsome princes. This collection wants to arouse the amazement of discovery, imagination, open-mindedness, set children free from feelings of inadequacy, inhibition, to educate them towards better social relations.

23Munari used the paratext as a playground where he could break down and reassemble formal elements, where he reformulated his concept of the publisher’s series again and again so as to make readers feel actively involved in the project and part of an on-going dialogue. The expression Simple tales and stories without fairies and wizards was a leitmotiv and what emerged, beyond the variations of every single issue, as a quest for children’s freedom and imagination. This is why he frequently stressed the importance of creativity, why he wrote ironic biographies, or covertly referred to his own work, as was the case in Dove andiamo?, the book he published in 1973 under the pseudonym E. Poi, where he hinted at his Cappuccetto series (Little Green, Yellow, White Riding Hood).

24The illustrations tended to be sequenced through a movie-like editing, so that children could easily follow them as the plot unfolds.

25These pages written and illustrated by Silvana Migliorati, A ognuno la sua casa, is a good example of this.

26The variety of authors in the series was remarkable: graphic designers, like Giancarlo Iliprandi, Pino Tovaglia and Aoi Huber Kono, photographers, like Mario De Biasi, set designers, like Lele Luzzati, artists and art dealers, such as Tino and Milli Gandini, as well as teachers, poets, and designers.

28These artists were as eclectic as Munari, who was a designer, author, illustrator, graphic designer, experimenter, and theorist of a total art that should be a democratic and non-elitist practice. His interest in childhood was the impetus for the whole publisher’s series project and it clearly stands out it in the books he authored. This was the case with Rose nell’insalata [Roses in the salad], an invitation to look at the shapes that vegetables can take if you cut them in half and use them as stamps, which he introduces as such:

Once upon a time, like in a fairy tale, a teacher cut a potato in half and on it she carved the image of a little goose that one of her pupils had drawn. She used this half potato as a stamp and stamped many little gooses. Now, what image do you get if you cut a lettuce stem and make a stamp out of it? You get many roses, much to the children’s and adults delight… If you manage to use red, green, purple, black, blue ink…. you’ll have a great variety. Watermelon and rosemary are no good for this game.

30This story is set in the old times when men, just like stray dogs, used to go wandering in the forest searching for food. Malerba – according to Munari’s biography – “wanted to be a painter but he tried to paint the blue sea dipping his brush right into the blue sea water. The canvas remained white, of course. This is how he started to be a writer and wrote great books like La scoperta dell’alfabeto and the Millemosche series, together with Tonino Guerra and with drawings by Adriano Zannino [..]”.

31The illustrator, Adriano Zannino, on the contrary, “wanted to be a writer but every time he took a pen in his hand, cats, birds, flowers, men, fish, trees and other things would come out instead of words. So he realized he’d better be an illustrator [..]”.

32Playing with semantics and painting mental vignettes was characteristic of Munari.

33An interesting debate arose at the very beginning of the publication of Tantibambini, a debate that is worth considering briefly. In April 1972 the Italian newspaper La Stampa published an article entitled “Without fairies and wizards” (Senza fate e senza maghi) by Natalia Ginzburg, a fine intellectual, and considered to embody the critical consciousness of Einaudi. At the time of writing, only four books had been published in the series, but this seemed to be enough to provoke Ginzburg to take a stand against it.

34Of L’uccellino Tic Tic, she wrote:

It’s the story of a little boy who is scared of the wolf, but Tic Tic the bird feeds the wolf with onions, sardines’ heads and old shoes, so the wolf is no longer hungry, it becomes good and the little boy is not scared anymore. A sweet story. Then I realized that what was annoying me were the words on the back cover. [..] Actually they were not just annoying me, I hated them. They sounded far too pretentious. I thought that giving children L’uccellino Tic Tic with no specific aim and significance, expecting that this collection should publish books of any kind, was fine, but if L’uccellino Tic Tic was presented through a pedagogical intent as a bible for the new generations, then it became disgusting.

35And again:

I gave it a second thought, I read L’uccellino Tic Tic again and I didn’t find it sweet anymore. The moral of the book is that we need to feed the wolves so they can be good. That’s not true. The author thinks that demystifying the image of the wolf is good for children. But wolves do exist. You can feed them as much as you want, but they’re still wolves and they can eat men. And there are people who are like wolves, the world is full of them. [...] I don’t see any advantage in children stopping fearing the wolves. We’re wrong if we believe that fear is bad. It is necessary for children to be scared and to learn how to overcome it.

36If Natalia Ginzburg appreciated the books as single units, she found the idea of including them in a series whose pedagogical intent was as harsh and stiff as “wooden scaffolding”. As for their content, Ginzburg underlined that alternative stories already existed, Einaudi had proved it when it had published Fiabe italiane, rewritten and curated by Italo Calvino. These tales were full of blood, fairies, princes, castles, good and bad people, they had no moral lesson to impart or pedagogical aims and were written “in a clear, linear, concrete style, an ideal prose that shows how children’s literature should be, totally devoid of unnecessary words”.

37Her article concluded:

• 14 Ginzburg Natalia, “Senza fate e senza maghi”, in Natalia Ginzburg, Vita immaginaria, Mondadori, Mil (...)

We can certainly express the wish that the new generations should be made up of free men. But we know nothing about it. We don’t even know if it’s good or bad to grow up with no inhibitions at all. Maybe we’ll soon find out that inhibitions, which men are so proud to have defeated, inhibitions and all the struggles of individuals to overcome them or to live with them, were the bread and salt for our soul¹⁴.

38Ginzburg’s article developed two main considerations: first, she was arguing against a model which in the name of nonconformity implied the creation of a new model, with different rules but also a strict framework; secondly, that writing for children is an extremely complicated task. This is especially so if we embrace the idea that we must avoid anything that might harm children and we end up censoring ourselves, building a cocoon-like world made of sterile stories: no evil characters, no blood, no pain, no fairies, no castles, no feelings.

39If, on the one hand, the fact that she spoke in such terms in a very important newspaper about an Einaudi series, the publisher to whom she was especially closely linked, might seem surprising – her loyal readers will not be surprised at all though – I argue, on the other hand, that her article should be read as a manifesto for anyone approaching children's literature. A manifesto against simplification at all costs, against cultural impoverishment and strict educational intent.

41Einaudi tried to make up for the poor sales by promoting the books with special jackets but this didn’t work either. So, we could close our story of Tantibambini with its commercial failure.

42But the hallmark of a consistent, creative and high quality project is also in its influence beyond its immediate reception, both in commercial and cultural terms. In this has been the case with Tantibambini series, which has recently begun a new publishing adventure.
So, before my conclusion, I would like to draw your attention to these covers:

Ill 23: Giancarlo Iliprandi, Iris Colombo, Mantua, Corraini, 2009.

44Corraini is republishing many titles of Einaudi collection, such as Alfabetiere, Cappuccetto bianco, Cappuccetto giallo and Cappuccetto verde by Bruno Munari, Iris Colombo by Giancarlo Iliprandi and Giuseppe verde, giallo, rosso e blu by Pino Tovaglia. In addition to this, the same imprint has released new titles, including: I musicanti di Brema illustrated by Katrin Stangl, Vecchie che cadono by Daniil Charms and Joanna Neborsky, Nella soffitta di mia zia by Andy Goodman, Pirulin senza parole by Chiara Carrer, Il paese del melograno by Aoi Kono, Il suono delle cose by William Wondriska.

45Munari’s work is still very much appreciated, as testified by his value on the rare book market: the first editions of Tantibambini have become collector’s pieces with unaffordable prices. His relationhip with the publisher Corraini dates back to 1992. This strong bond has shaped and influenced the whole publishing house program and catalogue.

46The opening of “Collana 22”, brings Munari’s project back and is a significant operation. If the strongest achievement of picture books is to be found in the successful combination of text, story, images and graphic design working together as a whole, then a book that complies with all these characteristics will continue to spark curiosity, interest, astonishment, and emotions in younger readers too, helping them shape a critical view on the world. This is what Munari thought. As for Natalia Ginzburg, she would probably be happy to know that “Collana 22” has made room for wolves.