Don Camillo Omnibus

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The Don Camillo books

I’ll conclude this initial series of posts on the Don Camillo books in English by mentioning the omnibus phenomenon. Over the years — especially during the early years of their popularity — the Don Camillo books were re-released in various editions combining two or more titles under one cover. All of these omnibuses (omnibi???) draw their material from the original books, and contain nothing new (if anything, they might omit some drawings or introductory material).

The only one I own, and can therefore tell you a little bit about, is a special one that came out in 1980, comprising the first five of the six books (i.e., all but Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children). It was issued by the British publisher, Gollancz, as a kind of companion to a then-upcoming Don Camillo TV series by the BBC — in fact, the book’s dust jacket features some nice glossy photos of the two lead actors (Mario Adorf and Brian Blessed) in the roles of Don Camillo and Peppone.  

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Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children

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The Don Camillo books

Guareschi’s final Don Camillo book in English (and the last of the original Italian ones) was published posthumously and is the second to have the feel of a novel rather than a short story collection. It is distinguished from all of the others, however, in that it pits the wily priest against a new enemy, one which is in many ways as formidable as Communism ever was: Modernity.  

Comrade Don Camillo

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The Don Camillo books

For those who’ve lost count, we’ve reached the fifth volume of Don Camillo in English. US & UK Fans waited seven years — the longest gap in the series — for this 1964 follow-up to Don Camillo Takes the Devil By the Tail, but they surely must have felt Comrade Don Camillo was worth it. Reading more like an actual novel than the usual loose connection of stories, and with a mood as timely as it was timeless, this book also had the distinction of being the first to take our Po Valley heroes out of their familiar milieu.  

Don Camillo Takes the Devil By the Tail

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The Don Camillo books

Like Don Camillo’s Dilemma before it, the fourth Don Camillo book in English isn’t a translation of any particular Italian book, but rather a collection assembled specially for Guareschi’s Anglophone audience. And like an even earlier book in the DC series, it’s one whose American and British editions differ slightly from each other.  

Don Camillo’s Dilemma

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The Don Camillo books

We come now to the first of two Don Camillo volumes in English which had no Italian counterpart. Both were published in the US and UK during the ten-year gap between the release of the second and third Italian Don Camillo books (the ones known in English as Don Camillo and His Flock and Comrade Don Camillo). Why such a gap existed in Italy, I don’t know– I guess there was less of a need for Don Camillo to appear frequently in book form in his country of origin, where new stories about the Little World continued to appear individually on a regular basis in Guareschi’s weekly paper Candido. The English-speaking world, however, had no access to the big priest except through story collections in book form: luckily for us, Guareschi’s US and UK publishers gave us this one.  

Don Camillo and His Flock

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The Don Camillo books

The second Don Camillo book in English goes by two names, depending which side of the pond you encounter(ed) it on. This has tricked more than one Amazon customer, some responding with spiteful 1-star reviews when they learn that, having just bought a secondhand copy of Don Camillo and the Prodigal Son expecting new stories, they’ve actually acquired the text of Don Camillo and His Flock again (or vice-versa).

That said, it’s definitely worth owning at least once!  

Take the quiz!

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Quizzes

Here’s something I used to do at the old website from time to time…

A Don Camillo Quiz! (click to launch)

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The Little World of Don Camillo – Part 2

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The Don Camillo books

A few tidbits about that first Don Camillo book:

Some history:
The Little World of Don Camillo is, of course, a translation of the very first Don Camillo book in Italian, Mondo piccolo: Don Camillo (Rizzoli, 1948). Credited with helping the Christian Democrats secure victory over the Communists in the Italian national election of 1948, the controversial book had became a runaway bestseller in Europe before coming to the attention of Sheila Cudahy, the distaff side of the American Catholic publishers Pellegrini & Cudahy (later acquired by Farrar, Straus, et al.), who worked hard to bring Don Camillo to an English- speaking audience. Una Vincenzo Troubridge, better known professionally as Colette’s first translator into English (and better known in general as the companion of author Radclyffe Hall), did the translation.

The Little World of Don Camillo – Part 1

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The Don Camillo books

With this post, I begin the promised series of entries on each of the Don Camillo books in English. Here, then, is the one that started it all:

The Little World of Don Camillo, by Giovanni Guareschi.
Copyright Giovanni Guareschi, 1950. Translated by Una Vincenzo Troubridge. NEW YORK: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1950. Published simultaneously in Canada by George J. MacLeod, Ltd., Toronto. First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz, Ltd.; 1951.  

The Don Camillo Books in English – Intro.

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The Don Camillo books

As I mentioned in yesterday’s FAQ, Giovannino Guareschi wrote 347 Don Camillo stories between 1946 and 1966. They were originally published individually — one chapter at a time, if you will — in Italian periodicals, the vast majority of them debuting in Guareschi’s own weekly paper, Candido, between 1946 and 1960. Then, from time to time, some of the stories were collected and published in book form, three such volumes appearing in Italian during the author’s lifetime (in 1948, 1953, and 1963) and a fourth just posthumously (in 1969). [In subsequent decades more posthumous collections were published in Italian, culminating in the late 1990s with a complete, multi-volume omnibus entitled Tutto Don Camillo.]