- Publishers Noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher
I think the best word to sum up the office of Air Mail would be an Italian one: sprezzatura. It means the art of making hard work appear effortless. The word originated in Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 The Book of the Courtier, but I was introduced to it by Peter Eisenman, who was running his own Renaissance court in my architecture graduate program.
The sense of ease, bordering on whimsy, starts at the front door of Air Mail’s building, where the buzzer has five entries:
(1) MR. & MRS. CEO
(2) AERO
(3) VADER
(4) DAPHNE
(5) VICTOR HUGO
The publication occupies only Unit 2, but when it moved in the rest of the apartments were empty, so the editors took the liberty of filling in all the names on the buzzer. Though the other units are now all full, no one has revisited that decision.
Inside, Air Mail coeditor Alessandra Stanley sits in front of a bookshelf stuffed full of picturesque boxes labeled “lett…