Sao Paulo
Before opening the Cosac Naify publishing house in 1997, Charles Cosac published a book about the work of Siron Franco, his close friend and artist, who was present with two huge paintings in the living room of his apartment in São Paulo.
The volume was the embryo of the publishing house that would become the market benchmark for quality publications over the following two decades, as it gave importance to the design of the books it published in a context in which publishers were concerned only with content.
After publishing 1,600 titles in more than ten fields of knowledge, including art, literature and children’s, Cosac laid off all employees and closed the company in December 2015. The uproar was immense among book lovers and shocked the market because it was abrupt.
Eight years after that fateful month, Cosac decided to return with the publishing house and it is no coincidence that the first publication of the new phase is a book by Siron Franco, which brings together the Goiás artist’s works from the collection of Justo Werlang. The opening will take place this Thursday at the Livraria da Travessa in São Paulo.
Even on the spine of the book you can see that something has changed, because the name Naify is no longer on the logo. Now the publisher is just called Cosac. Michael Naify, Charles’ brotherinlaw, became a photographer and has nothing to do with the new company, which uses the same CNPJ as the old publisher.
“Cosac can grow, but it will not have anywhere near the same model as Cosac Naify. I don’t want to create another monster that I’m afraid of. When I saw it, we had 120 employees. It was huge. “Responsibility is on my shoulders,” says Cosac between a sip of Coke Zero and ice cream.
Monographic books by artists Daniel Senise and José Resende will be printed next year a sculpture of which Cosac has on the coffee table in the living room. However, the editor spends much of the interview talking about a project that took him three years to complete and is scheduled to release in January.
“Florindas,” the new Cosac’s first luxury release, based on the wish books of the old Cosac, is a twovolume box set about AfroBrazilian jewelry in Bahia in the 18th and 19th centuries. With texts by Lilia Schwarcz, Mary Del Priore, Pedro Corrêa do Lago and other intellectuals, one of the books tells the life of the liberated Florinda Anna do Nascimento, known for her majestically displayed rings, necklaces and bracelets.
The other volume is dedicated to her jewelry, with images and the historical context of “Creole jewelry,” a term previously used for accessories worn by slaves, a term that Cosac rejects in favor of the term Bahian jewelry.
It is very difficult to photograph rings without a finger, he says “I can’t do it, I’m turning into H. Stern” and that’s why the editor asked Zezé Motta to wear the jewelry of the former slave Christian Cravo when taking photos . One of the portraits became the cover of the book.
“I didn’t want a ‘globe’ that was at the peak of its form and success,” says Cosac, explaining why he did not accept the proposal to invite the actress Taís Araújo as his jewelry model.
According to him, “Florindas” examines the condition of black women during slavery. “Was it bad? It was. But did some of them do well? That’s what they did. We always have Chica da Silva’s idea, but she wasn’t the only one. In fact, there were several Chicas da Silva.” “
In the years following Cosac Naify’s closure, the publisher published a posthumous book about Tunga, with whom he was closely associated, and another about the photojournalist Gervásio Baptista, author of the famous photo of Juscelino Kubitschek showing his top hat to the people at Cosac Naify waved inauguration of Brasilia. The first came out with the CosacNaify seal, the second was an order from the Federal Court of Justice.
He also worked as director of the Mario de Andrade Library in São Paulo, a period he said was one of the happiest of his life, and directed the National Museum of the Republic in Brasília.
A few months ago, Cosac returned to São Paulo after almost two years in Rio de Janeiro, his hometown, a time he describes as “sad” and “horrible.” He took his collection of Brazilian baroque and contemporary art out of storage, took his dogs with him and moved into a rented apartment just a few meters from the old CosacNaify headquarters in the Vila Buarque neighborhood.
He is now looking for a commercial space in the same building as Cosac Naify and would like to gradually form a team that will work there personally. His goal is to continue publishing books until he is 80 he is 60 today.
Despite his symbolic and real rapprochement with the former publisher, Cosac explains that he neither misses the company nor regrets its closure. “I caused this, I wanted it,” he says, adding that he did not suffer any industrial action from over a hundred employees.
Another of his projects is to rescue and republish some titles from the old house, such as a series of essays by Ismail Xavier, one of the most important theorists of Brazilian cinema, as well as to publish academic books that university presses cannot publish. flow rate.
But when it comes to Cosac, the return of his publisher shouldn’t lead to the uproar and endless queues that Cosac Naify causes every yearend at the USP Book Festival especially because he says he doesn’t want to attend trade shows.
“I don’t follow the publishing market and don’t want to follow it. I want to work with very few bookstores and Amazon. I don’t make these books to make a living. If something happens, it would be a loss. “So I can afford not to stay connected to the marketplace.”