English-Italian Pocket Dictionary, Tudor Publishing, c. 1945–1960

The Piece

Dictionary English-Italian, Italiano-Inglese Dizionario, by L. Meller and F. Mazzucato, published by the Tudor Publishing Company, New York. A pocket dictionary bound in flexible red leatherette with a fine pebbled grain, lettered in silver on the front and nothing on the back. The covers overhang the text block on all three edges in the yapp manner, rounded at the corners, so the thing closes soft in the hand like a missal.

The title page gives it in both directions: English-Italian Pronouncing Dictionary over Dizionario Italiano-Inglese con pronuncia figurata, with the Tudor imprint and New York at the foot. The copyright page reads All Rights Reserved, Copyright by Casa Editrice Elmo, Printed in Italy, and at the bottom of the page, Printed in Italy by Tipolitografia Corbella, Milano. No year appears anywhere in the book.

Inside is a two column setting on thin paper, headwords in bold with the part of speech, the translation, and then the pronunciation in brackets spelled out phonetically rather than in the international alphabet. Cyanosis becomes cianosi, cha-no'-see. Decapitation becomes decapitazione, deh-kah-pee-tah-tzyo'-neh. Running heads in capitals at the outer corners, CYA and DEC, the way a thumb finds a page.

A small discrepancy worth recording: the front cover is lettered MAZZUCCATO with two Cs and the title page sets it MAZZUCATO with one. The title page is likely right.

History & Provenance

This is an American issue of an Italian book. Casa Editrice Elmo of Milan owned the text and held the copyright, Tipolitografia Corbella of Milan did the printing, and the Tudor Publishing Company of New York put its name on the cover and sold it in the United States. The entire object was manufactured in Italy and shipped over, which is why the paper, the setting and the binding all read European rather than American.

Dating it takes inference because the book will not say. The Elmo edition of the Meller and Mazzucato dictionary is listed by Italian booksellers with a publication year of 1945 at 410 pages, which puts a floor under the text. Tudor was a New York reprint house active across the middle of the century, and flexible red leatherette with rounded yapp edges is a binding style that belongs to the late forties through the early sixties. The range given here follows from those two facts and nothing printed in the book itself confirms it.

What it was for is easier. A pocket bilingual dictionary with phonetic respelling, sized to go in a coat, is a traveler's book or an immigrant's book. It is not a scholar's dictionary and never pretended to be. Somebody carried this one.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Small and red and soft. That is most of it, and it is enough. A pocket book in flexible red leather grain photographs well in a stack, fills a gap at the end of a shelf, and sits on a nightstand or a desk corner without asking for anything. The color is saturated and even, which a cloth book of the same age usually is not.

The rest is that it is a real traveler's object rather than a decorator reproduction. Printed in Milan, sold in New York, sized for a coat pocket, with the pronunciation spelled out for somebody who needed to be understood out loud. Open it on a table of Italian material, a pile of maps or a tray of small things and it reads immediately.

This is modest inventory and priced as such. Buy it for the color, the size and the fact that it is honest.