Farewell to Luigi Spagnol, the publisher who brought Harry Potter to Italy

Publisher Luigi Spagnol, vice chairman of the Gems Group, president of Salani and editorial director of Ponte alle Grazie, has died in Milan at the age of 59. He had been ill for some time.

Luigi Spagnol was a child of art: born in Milan in 1961 to the great publisher Mario Spagnol (Lerici, 1930 - 1999), who worked at Bompiani before joining Feltrinelli and then becoming editorial director of Mondadori and managing director of Longanesi, Luigi had studied art history in Paris but then followed in his father’s footsteps, beginning work at Longanesi. Luigi Spagnol was known for his great talent in unearthing best-sellers: with his work at Salani, which he began at a very young age (in 1989, when he was only twenty-eight), he had established one of the most important catalogs of children’s books (his great specialty) in the world.

It was precisely in this sphere that he is remembered for having brought to Italy first the History of a Little Gull and the Cat Who Taught Her to Fly by the late Luis Sepúlveda (published in Italy by Salani in 1996), then again the books by the British writer Roald Dahl, and above all the Harry Potter saga: the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in Italy by Salani in 1998. Spagnol had the intuition that later came true on time, that Harry Potter would immediately become a children’s classic.

In 2005, together with publishers Stefano Mauri and Achille Mauri, he had founded the Mauri Spagnol Publishing Group, which brought together the two family-owned publishing houses: including Bollati Boringhieri, Chiarelettere, Corbaccio, Garzanti, Guanda, Longanesi, Nord, Ponte alle Grazie, Salani, Tea and Vallardi.

“For me it was like having a brother at work,” Stefano Mauri recalls. “In more than 30 years we shared many adventures. Luigi was a person of substance, he did not mind honors. Now, however, I want it to be clear to everyone who has disappeared. Gone is the person who, with his publishing successes, has demonstrated more than once in the last thirty years that he knows better than anyone else what a book is, what a book can do for readers and how far it can go. I would like to try to explain it in his own words: ’Books are written by people, read by people, sold by people, and are about people. It is therefore essential that they are also published by people, free to follow their own ideas, strategies, and passions.”

Farewell to Luigi Spagnol, the publisher who brought Harry Potter to Italy

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