It's spring, and our Winter journey begins

When I succeeded in squeezing the first (few) euros out of the pockets of my hapless co-investor friends (in 2006) to start Simplicissimus Book Farm, I waved a prototype of the historical iLiad under their noses (the first ebook reader with eink technology to hit the market), enthusiastically saying that digital publishing would soon be a hot investment opportunity, and that I planned on … becoming a digital publisher!
An ambition soon to be thwarted: once the company was founded we found ourselves selling pieces of iron, and then creating solutions and services for publishers and authors. In short, everything except being publishers.
Today, after about six years (!), I can finally keep the promise I made back then to my partners: as of today, we have also become publishers with the release of our first series, Winter journey.
All this, however, would not have been possible without the help and support of three very special and dear friends who I would like to thank publicly.
The first of these is Patrizia Dalpiano: if she somehow accepted and supported this undertaking of mine for all these years, even handling the book-keeping, it certainly wasn’t in the name of various things like eink-epub-kindle-ipad that I went on babbling about. I believe it was precisely in view of the ever strived for (and until now never realized) dream of creating a new and unique type of publishing.
The second person who constantly supported me throughout all these years with great serenity and equal determination is Ann Bises, a psychotherapist in Milan, and first partner of SBF: of all the partners she’s certainly the one who always reminded us of our original mission.
The third person is Alessandro Zignani, who agreed to edit the first series for our publishing debut, Winter journey. I met him at the 2011 Book Fair, when he showed up with remarkable naturalness at our stand to introduce a book he had just published by self publisher on Narcissus. Only later did I discover (thanks to Patrizia who wisely stayed in contact with him) that Alessandro Zignani is a wonderful musicologist, an outstanding writer, and above all a provocative thinker. We’ve talked and talked about it for an entire year now, and finally we’ve done it.
Winter journey (a series which owes its name to the atmosphere and circle of thought of the famous lieder collection Winterreise by Schubert) – Simplicissimus provided Alessandro with all the necessary tools to give life to a pure or even age-old editorial experiment: renewing a classic antiquity often made unfeasible by traditional market dynamics, and which the sensational force of digital publishing may perhaps bring back to life. Publishing made of ideas, writings and readings which are sought out, discussed and circulated not according to the rules of the Factory of Bestsellers, but for pure love itself for those ideas, those writings, those readings and that vital circulation of thought. But it would be better if you read the ideas inspiring Winter journey for yourself directly from him, from Alessandro Zignani who came up with them, and for whom we, as “age-old publishers“, are limited to creating an opportunity which no longer seemed to exist.
Thanks Patrizia, thanks Ann, thanks Alessandro.
And thank you to all those among my twenty-five readers who will support this initiative, or even criticize it harshly, by buying Abraxas, the first title published, written by Zignani himself, which will be followed every two weeks by the next six titles written by other authors.