Nicolae ?one and a book that changed his life

During his teenage years, Nicolae ?one, the manager of the Vinea Publishing House, was very keen on mathematics, practiced sports at the juniors' club in Giurgiu and competed with similar famous clubs within the national league. ?one remembers that, after a match with Steaua, the coach of the Bucharest team patted his head and encouraged him, which almost left the junior from Giurgiu speechless, as the man dressed in a sports suit was the famous goalkeeper of the former CCA, Ion Voinescu himself.

However, football played only a secondary role in Nicolae ?one's destiny. One day, one of those insignificant events that change people's life, occurred in ?one's life and radically changed his destiny into something totally unpredictable.

It so happened that this teenager, who had very little knowledge of literature, attended a book release and that the book was A.E. Baconsky's anthology entitled "The Panorama of Contemporary Universal Poetry." It was this anthology that the future editor read over and over again and learnt by heart, thus being "infected" with the microbe of poetry, which made him abandon football and leave behind his love of mathematics. So, the former aspirant to the glory of stadiums became the manager of a publishing house that deals almost exclusively with poetry books.

Founded in 1991, the Vinea Publishing House was soon acknowledged as one of the few places where poets have always been welcome, even in the middle of the so-called transition that followed after December 1989. It was this publishing house that released the "Definitive" series, which followed an older tradition of the former Editura Fundatiilor, that inaugurated, under an elegant presentation (the "livre de poche" type), the "Generatia '80" (The generation of the "80s) and "Nouazeci" (Ninety) collections. It was this publishing house that made possible spectacular debuts in poetry for such young poets as Ion Zvera. The Vinea Publishing House is currently preparing to promote the 2000 plus Generation.

At present, Nicolae ?one intends to publish again the book that changed his destiny in such a radical way. By the end of the year, the second edition of Baconsky's "panorama" will be released. It will be enriched with an addenda of texts signed by Ion Vinea and V. Voiculescu, two authors Baconsky himself would have liked to include in his anthology if he had not been terrorised by the idea of the "reasonable space." The "Panorama" will also include a "history" of the first edition, written by Petre Ghelmez (the editor of 1972), as well as several letters addressed to Ghelmez and signed by A.E. Baconsky.

As "The panorama" remains for Nicolae ?one the ideal prototype of any anthology, the manager of the Vinea Publishing House is preparing a real series of "panoramas," which are to be released starting this year, some of them intended to have European echoes. A "Panorama of the avant-garde Romanian art and literature" (from Brancusi to Gellu Naum) is to be published and translated (based on an international project) into all the languages of the old continent.