We don’t usually understand literature as a dialogue. Typically, when publishing professionals think of readers, they think they need to entice them to buy the book so they may have hours of pleasant or enriching cultural entertainment. The author’s name is repeated ad nauseam: on the cover, on the spine, on the frontispiece, on the credits page, sometimes at the top of pages, and occasionally even in the epigraph, as if to remind the reader that the book “has a sole owner.” The role of a more conventional epigraph, with a quote from another author’s work, is to present the author’s family tree; it shows readers where what they are about to read comes from, subtly pointing to the book’s ancestry, introducing the text’s forebearers. I have seen cases where an author takes an epigraph from their own work and doesn’t cite the source; in this manner, they don’t trace a line to their predecessors, but begin the book by navel-gazing.

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A good or well-chosen epigraph speaks to the rest of the book, but when it’s merely an exercise in narcissism, all it does is add gloss to the writer’s biography, which is usually emblazoned across the inside flaps or on the back cover anyway.

Signposting the role of the author with all these markings is, to some extent, fair. It extols their artistic work, but it is also part of a culture that establishes the absolute primacy of writers in relation to readers—the same thing happens in other arts, with the artist occupying cameras, stages, daises, and walls. In this manner, readers and audiences aren’t considered part of the work; they are simply passive consumers. But it’s worth remembering that this wasn’t always the case.

Fictional texts awaken entirely personal resources of the imagination at both the moment of writing and the moment of reading. In this way, the book that remains etched in each reader’s mind is unique to them.

The lines of a silent power struggle between writer and readers are drawn in the book itself. Symbolically, during and after reading, one might rightfully ask: Whose book is this?

I’ve always been keen to find studies that investigate what leads something to emerge from a writer’s memory and imagination and migrate to the pages of books, whether first written out by hand or composed on the blank page of a computer screen.

I dream of making a more systematic investigation of the psychology and neuroscience of artistic creation, to help me understand the inner workings of memory and its relationship to literary creation. I may not have the time to properly explore the subject until I retire, which would be somewhat cruel: I’ll be better able to understand my trade once I’ve left it. I will read about the past of the practice to which I have dedicated my life as if I were a first-year student of literature or publishing, as if I were returning to the early days of my internship at Brasiliense—where I began without knowing anything about books, except that I loved them and couldn’t live without This deep analytical knowledge will connect in my mind with so many memories of accompanying hundreds of authors in their creative process without ever daring to theorize about it. I don’t believe that any kind of original, theoretical study is possible for me, as an editor. This is a profession in which we know a little about a lot of things, but never delve deeply into such a complex subject. An editor, no matter how learned, isn’t a true scholar; we can’t be experts in a of subjects and scrutinize texts with extra-editorial, analytical authority. There are, of course, exceptions. In any case, what falls to us is a concern for readers, which is something we must take on at the beginning of our relationship with an author, relieving them of at least some of their apprehension about the reception of their work and its commercial fate.

That said, my first lesson in the meaning of writing came from reading Sigmund Freud’s magnificent text “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.”‘ In it, the Viennese psychoanalyst explains how writing is a form of fantasy or daydream that substitutes the play of childhood and is as serious and profound as a child’s play. Both fantasy and daydream stand in opposition not to what is serious, but to what is real. So when a writer offers us his or her self, spread across multiple selves, they do so with literary rigor and technique, enabling us to transcend the barriers that separate us from so many other selves in everyday life. This and countless other masterful texts explain why Freud, quite rightly, received the city of Frankfurt’s Goethe Prize.

As we mature, we lose our ability to play. We are orphaned, having lost the effective way that, from a tender age, we learned to counter reality. So we progress to daydreaming, our new form of adult play. In this manner, writing and fantasy relieves adults of the selfish flights of fancy that give rise to tension in our psyches. Hence the strong identification between author and reader in the coming together of fantasies and the pleasure generated by someone else’s flight of fancy, which has the power to appease our guilt for this adult “play.”

With this brief detour into Freudian theory, I am still far from understanding the unconscious realms of writing, but it’s a good start. Until I am able to learn more about the deep mechanisms of the writer’s psyche that underpin literary creation, I will concern myself with another enigma: how the memory of a book is formed, the memory that will stay with the reader. In this case, it’s easy to conclude that what is absorbed from a fictional text depends as much on the innermost depths of the writer as of those who read it. This is because fictional texts awaken entirely personal resources of the imagination at both the moment of writing and the moment of reading. In this way, the book that remains etched in each reader’s mind is unique to them.

But if the author’s name is all over the place and the book is ultimately a construct of its dialogue with readers, where does this second protagonist materially enter the book? What marks would indicate the dialogue between these two fantasies? If the author is everywhere, where does the reader reside? Or, better, how is the clash between two imaginations represented graphically?

I believe that the reader’s signature at the opening symbolizes many things and marks the dialogue, or the loving dispute, that begins on the very first line of a book and which can be expressed in infinite ways.

As I see it, the reader inhabits a book’s blank spaces. The edges of pages, at the top, bottom, and sides—as well as the spaces between the lines, which we call leading—are the places that symbolize the reader’s presence. The blank area, or the area not occupied by the author’s work, has almost the same importance in a book as that occupied by the ink used to print the text. That’s where the reader is. An oppressive, solid text block (the space occupied by the letters on a page) is, in addition to being ugly, inappropriate, because it indirectly suggests that ownership of the book, during and after reading, isn’t shared. It peremptorily asserts that there is only one presence in the book: the author’s.

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Stingy line spacing states that the editor, with all his or her power, was incapable of recognizing that the place right beside what the writer says is where the reader’s imagination stakes its claim. Lines that are too close together reinforce the author’s supremacy, gracelessly.

The way a book has been handled, underlined, and annotated, as well as the creases in the corners of pages, are reminders of this dispute and of the reader’s assertion of ownership that will remain forever on their bookshelves.

For the same reason, I believe a good book should begin with a blank page (or flyleaf), or with the title of the work alone, so that the reader has a place to put their name, their signature, or, as in times past, their bookplate, becoming the new owner of the text and, in this way, the author’s neighbor.

I remember what we used to do with schoolbooks, in which we’d write our names so they wouldn’t get lost on a school bench or in another classmate’s backpack. Could this be where the habit of signing one of the front pages of a book after reading it, before putting it away on a shelf, comes from?

I believe that the reader’s signature at the opening symbolizes many things and marks the dialogue, or the loving dispute, that begins on the very first line of a book and which can be expressed in infinite ways.

The blank page, available to the reader, resembles the blank page or screen that the author stares at before they begin to write a new story. These are demarcated spaces that harbor countless possibilities and contain the infinite, as if in a story by Jorge Luis Borges.

The first line of the text, the strokes that begin to fill the white background, mark a fundamental choice that will determine everything that flows from there. A choice that might begin like this: “As always, the writer awoke that morning full of questions…”

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Excerpted from The First Reader: On Writers and Editors by Luiz Schwarcz. Published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Luiz Schwarcz. Translation by Alison Entrekin.