ABSTRACT
Hilarius Bookbinder is the editor of Stages on Life’s Way, no doubt the most overtly dialogical book in Kierkegaard’s authorship. “Lectori benevolo!,”1 the preface by the bookbinder turned editor and publisher, is conceived to create a very close relation with the reader, in deep contrast with the modalities of communication of the chapters of Stages on Life’s Way, which tend to increase the effect of communication in double reflection in various ways. Under the form of the report about the writings now published, Hilarius Bookbinder confides in the reader his own life as bookbinder, and his personal details as widower and father; moreover, the preface also contains relevant information providing insight into the explanations concerning his pseudonymity, given by Kierkegaard a year later in “A First and Last Explanation,” in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.2
