Sparrow & copper
Sperling & Kupfer is an Italian publisher with German roots. He has been part of the Mondadori publishing group since 1995 .
history
As a technical and scientific specialist publisher, Sperling Druck was founded in Stuttgart in 1895 by Heinrich Otto Sperling . The publishing house quickly broadened its position, both factually and geographically. Subsidiaries were established in France , Belgium , Luxembourg and Italy . In June 1899 a branch was opened in Milan , from which today's Italian publishing company developed.
The German parent publisher Sperling published the Neue Naturheilkunde by Alfred Bilz and the Great Geographic Atlas by Adolf Stieler in 1906 and in 1909 the illustrated technical vocabulary by Alfred Schlomann .
The expansion of the company as Sperling & Kupfer goes back to the then head of the Italian office Richard Kupfer . From 1911 onwards, its increasingly independent Italian branch concentrated on the local book market. With the outbreak of the First World War , the publishing work in Italy had to be stopped for the time being, as the owners had German citizenship and were thus forced to leave Italy. The activity was continued in 1925 with the transfer of the Sperling shares to Kupfer. Kupfer thus became the sole owner of the brand and was able to use it for its now independent operation in Italy. In 1927 the publishing house became a limited partnership and Richard Kupfer moved to Lugano and withdrew himself further and further from the operational business, appointed Harry Betz in 1929 and Federico Giannoni in 1935 as managing directors before he sold the publishing house to Carlo Alessandro De Michelis in 1936.
In the 1930s, two prestigious narrative series started: Narratori Nordici (1929) and Pandora (1931), which brought northern and central European fairy tales, stories and legends into the horizon of the broad Italian public for the first time, as well as two encyclopedias : Encyclopedia of Masters ( 1934) and Enciclopedia Bancaria (1937). In the late 1930s / early 1940s, large volumes on hygiene , medicine , urban planning , atlases and magazines (such as geopolitics and the Polytechnic Library Announcer , which continued well into the post-war period) were published.
In 1943 the publishing house was temporarily relocated to Merano due to the bombing . At the end of the war they returned to Milan and specialized in social research , economic policy and scientific manuals . In the 1970s, the publishing house changed hands again and has now passed into the hands of a group of ten members around Tiziano Barbieri Torriani. Torriani imported several major bestselling American authors, including Irving Wallace , Sidney Sheldon , Judith Krantz , Danielle Steel , Barbara Taylor Bradford, and Stephen King .
Torriani remained managing director until his death in 1995, even after the takeover of Sperling & Kupfer by the Mondadori Group in the same year.
In 1988, the subsidiary Sperling Taschenbuch was founded. In 1995 the I-Miti series for economic literature was started.
In 2013 a successful wellness series was started which deals with "body, mind and soul care". In 2016 the Pickwick Big series was launched, which deals with so-called longsellers , including works by Stephen King , La Vigna di Angelica by Sveva Casati Modignani, The Wolf Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
Parts of the company
Sperling & Kupfer has developed narratives, nonfiction, economics, manuals and dissemination as the main product lines.
- Sperling & Kupfer editori: public essays on current and narrative topics
- Frassinelli: Founded in 1931, offers new fiction and Italian and international non-fiction, published authors Toni Morrison , Nuruddin Farah , Meir Shalev , Valerio Varesi , Anna Gavalda , Richard Flanagan and Nicholas Sparks .
- Mondadori Informatica: Italian publisher of Microsoft Press volumes and publisher of books for Adobe Inc. , Macromedia , Linux and Apple Macintosh .
Individual evidence
- ^ 'Gabriele Turi (1997) Storia dell'editoria nell'Italia contemporanea, Giunti, p. 162f. (Italian)