On Saturday, Feb. 17, at 5 p.m., the BiblioCoop reading point in Figline (6 Hungary Street) will host the presentation of the book "The Rifle and the Sewing Machine. For a Social History of Consumer Cooperation" by Pippo Russo .
It will be presented by its author, a professor of sociology at the University of Florence, who published it in 2017 with the publishing house Editpress.
This is a popular novel, within which the personal stories of its protagonists are intertwined with those of the historical and labor context of reference (period between 1891 and 1950).
The volume, in fact, stems from Pippo Russo's research on documents kept in the Historical Archives of Unicoop Florence, where he was looking for materials for sociological research on the functioning of cooperatives. The minutes of the Boards of Directors and Executive Committees he came across, however, are not formal documents with a bureaucratic slant, but testimonies of episodes of cooperative life, including the one that gives the volume its title. It is a lottery organized by one of Italy's oldest cooperatives, the one in Sesto Fiorentino, aimed at raising funds to finance the construction of a new premises. Two prizes were up for grabs: one designed for men (rifle), immediately picked up by the winner after the winning numbers were drawn; the other for women (sewing machine), which would never be picked up and, therefore, sold out.
This event is also part of the reading promotion event "Literary Agenda for a Reading Community."
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