Unfortunately, almost everyone around is ready to announce (and receive), with exaggerated advance, the bad, false news of the death of books, newspapers and all “printed paper”. But there are at least two pieces of real news regarding this subject. One is very good, so good that you wouldn’t even have been able to imagine it, but it certainly would have pleased you a lot: on 4th November of this year, the Americans elected a black Democrat as the new President of the United States. His name is Barack Obama and I can just picture the gall-enraged faces of the surviving idiots who belong to the Ku Klux Klan and those nazified bastards from Illinois (the Blues Brothers would have known how to make them end up in the river) and also the livid features of those turncoat politicians who are now jumping on the winner’s bandwagon and applauding him, but who will be ready to stab him in the back at his first slip. I tried mentally to find the connection between this incredible event and all the rest that happened before and even what is yet to come, like you were able to do in more than one of your writings. It suddenly came to my mind that maybe in all this turning of the samsara wheel, in this flipping over of the Evolved Western Capitalistic System that is now heading back, at least symbolically, to the big mother Africa – in all this there could be, dissolved like a drop of good wine in the ocean, the vast irreproducible greatness of your work without a homeland, without a flag, given to the world, reflecting your love for American artists in your articles about them that are still here, printed in the past pages of Domus. The other good news is that the morning after the elections, millions of Americans rushed out to buy the papers, every last copy that announced the outcome, until they were all sold out and had to be reprinted to the tune of tens of thousands. Even The New York Times is now selling the 5th November issue’s front page with Obama’s victory for a pretty penny. Could this mean that instead of keeping this fantastic news as an electronic bookmark in some unspecified notebook that no one will even be able to open five years from now, let alone make it work, could it mean that the delicate, decomposable, ephemeral paper that records the news will be able to survive the great Internet circus for a few hundred more years?
Dear Ettore, you who, as legend has it, grabbed the pencil from your father’s hand as soon as you were born, and then proceeded to fill tens of thousands of sheets of paper with strong and delicate drawings, you who continued to love the printing and binding of paper, its heaviness and lightness once it became a book, like a man loves the scent of his woman, or the flavour of his favourite food, you can understand why your letter will remain well preserved in my confused stacks of paper. I might succeed in making good use of that sheet. Maybe the moment will come to print that story and other writings in a new book. This letter of yours would be perfect for the beginning, like a good omen, a keepsake from one of those talented people who taught me how to write about art, architecture and other strange things. But in the meanwhile, just in case, your letter is printed here in commemoration of your first anniversary as a nonreligious saint, just like your friends – poets, drunks, drug addicts, liars, dreamers and falsifiers of reality and words – as I try to remember you better, a bit like the last time I saw you, but also, and above all, the way you are in that photo, 37 years old, in a room at the Gritti in Venice, where you’re leaning on the arm of “Papa” Hemingway’s chair and you’re looking at each other smiling, like a son looking at his father and vice versa: the writer of good novels and the inventor of projects that are so important as to be put in other books, all yet to be written, formatted, printed, read and preserved – spread out in all corners of the house or in orderly rows on beautiful bookshelves like the ones you designed, for the ignorant and the cultivated, for rationalists and post-modernists, for directors and employees, for all the people who make up this world, which you surely never stopped observing with the curiosity of a child and the wisdom of an ancient reader, writer and designer of books.
Affectionately,
Stefano
