Armando Dadò Editore Tipografia Stazione SA

In her activity the publishing house of Armando Dadò published more than a thousand books. The catalogue, which has been composing since 1961 to date, includes works on the most diverse sectors: from literature to art, from history to politics, from costume to ethnography, from current to natural sciences.

Many of the volumes published, in particular in recent years, are linked to the regional reality, investigated in its various aspects; a reality that the locarnese house has sought and tries to promote not only within the regional and cantonal borders but also to their outside, making known beyond Gottardo and in Italy the specificities of our lands.

To find the origins of the company, we must go back to the summer of 1961, when a group of friends decides to gather forces and funds necessary to give life to Locarno to a new typography. Officially it was born on July 22 of that year, day of establishment of an anonymous company that declares a share capital of 150 thousand francs and that it includes in its Board of Directors also Plinio Martini, a Valmaggese writer who a few years later will animate the literary scene of Italian Switzerland.

Prudent the debut: In the early years the activity is essentially that of a small typography that employs less than half a dozen employees. The company is located in a couple of premises of the old Pax Palace in Muralto, right in front of the SBB Station (it is by virtue of this proximity that will be named Typography Station). The first works are printed commercially, composed of lead and embossed according to the methods of a tradition that is now dismantled.

The owner, however, is not enough: he discovers the passion for books. Armando Dadò arrives at the publishing house through a knowledge that will later turn into fertile friendship: that with the poet and engraver Giovanni Bianconi, who proposes to publish his own book of ethnography. . .