ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of Italy's political unification, publishers, librarians, illustrators, and novelists, as well as statesmen and members of parliament, insisted that books — printed, illustrated, sold, bought, handled, stored, and perhaps read — served as an index of the greatness and power of a country. It is perplexing to see the extent to which, in post-Risorgimento Italy, statistics of the Italian print industry were brandished as the most reliable diagnostics of the 'material and moral progress of the nation'. Italy's allocation to the military, Giuseppe Natoli reported, was the highest in Europe. The readers invoked by the publishers, librarians, and statesmen of post-Risorgimento Italy hardly match the readers evoked by its writers, except for their new and noticeable predisposition to tally. The number of readers are everywhere — in their letters, their prefaces, and, sometimes, in their novels. Where Pompeo Molmenti argued that libraries were crucial to national security, Guido Biagi valued libraries for their expansionist potential.
