This article examines the production of literature for schools through the lens of the anthology reader, the primary medium for connecting with literature in schools. Two theoretical concepts guide the analysis of how literary prestige is constructed for authors in the school context: transtextuality, which explores how the anthology reader develops in opposition to pre-existing models, and amphitextuality, which concerns the relationship between authors and text excerpts appearing on the same page or within the same section of anthologies. The study employs a historical-didactic methodology and a comparative approach on two levels: first, it compares educational levels, including students of the same age but from different school types (the upper level of primary school and the lower level of secondary school); second, it analyses two linguistic regions of Switzerland – Italian-speaking Ticino and French-speaking Switzerland (with a focus on the canton of Geneva) – between 1860 and 1930.