This experience convinced Júlio to assume a "foreign" pen name. He chose an Arabian identity — because, as he declared in an interview, the Arabs were unsurpassed in the art of storytelling. For the next seven years he prepared himself by studying Arabic and reading all he could on Islamic culture. In 1925, he sold the idea of a series of tales on Oriental themes to Irineu Marinho, editor of the newspaper "A Noite" (which would later become a huge Brazilian media conglomerate, the Organizações Globo). His stories, published in the column "Contos de Malba Tahan" ("Tales of Malba Tahan"), were attributed to a fictitious Arabian scholar of that name, and ostensibly translated by an equally fictitious "Professor Breno Alencar Bianco".