Giulio Einaudi, who has died aged 87, was one of the most influential Italian publishers of this century. He opened Italian culture to literary and scientific ideas from abroad and published many of Italy's most eminent writers.
He was the son of Luigi Einaudi, Italy's second post-war president; he failed in Italian when he took his university entrance exam at the age of 17, hardly a promising start for the future publisher. The prejudices of a fascist examiner affected that result, and vigorous anti-fascism characterised Einaudi's intellectual career.
He founded the house that bears his name in Turin in 1933. His first book was Henry A Wallace's What Does America Want? and it was panned in a newspaper review by Benito Mussolini himself. In 1934, the police said the purpose of the company was 'disseminating anti-fascist publications and gathering together anti-fascist elements from the intellectual world'.
The next year, Einaudi was briefly imprisoned, along with three collaborators, Leone Ginzburg, Carlo Levi and Cesare Pavese. The Einaudi company continued publishing through the second world war, despite persecution by the regime and the destruction of offices in an allied bombing raid. Einaudi fled to Switzerland, later returning to participate in the Resistance in his native Piedmont.Timid, and with an aristocratic manner, he was said to have requested a cup of tea with lemon when given hospitality in a Swiss peasant's farmhouse overflowing with refugees. He was proud of his anti-fascism, and of the non-conformity of his books even when the Mussolini regime was at its height. Several colleagues died for their beliefs.
After the war, the haughty and spendthrift publisher, dubbed 'the Prince' by his own circle, enjoyed a close and controversial relationship with the Italian Communist Party (PCI). More recently, his critics accused him of helping to create a communist hegemony in Italian culture and of practising rigid self-censorship over the Soviet system's shortcomings.
But others defended him as an open-minded man, who relished the clash of ideas and was influenced by the economic liberalism of his father. The novelists Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg, and the philosopher Norberto Bobbio, were among the free spirits that Einaudi gathered around him, who contributed to the post-war success of his company.
Einaudi delighted in fierce discussions around the oval table at Wednesday meetings in his Turin office, goading the company readers to battle with one another. He had an expert nose for books, and, after 50 years, a catalogue of 5,000 titles - a history of 20th century Italian intellectual life. Primo Levi, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Leonardo Sciascia, Elsa Morante and the poet Eugenio Montale are among his authors. Einaudi published translations of Goethe and Defoe in 1938, and he was the first to bring Freud and Jung to the Italian public.
There were pitfalls. Einaudi's cavalier attitude towards money, and the complacency bred by success, led to financial crises and to the sale of the company in 1994 to Silvio Berlusconi, the political antithesis of the left-wing Prince. In an interview, Einaudi conceded that his catalogue 'seemed so perfect that to go forward we only had to extend it, multiply it. And so we fell into opacity and the crises arrived.'
Though it became a handicap, Einaudi's disdain for money was his most engaging characteristic. In later years that Wednesday meeting was 'an oasis of relaxation' for the publisher. He said: 'It was the only time that I totally reinserted myself into my work: I heard people speak of books and not of money. And if anyone permitted themselves to say 'it costs', I would shut them up at once.'