ENG — Curiosity — from Latin curiositāte — the desire to learn or know about anything

Through curiosity, I started projects such as O Editorial (formerly a blog and now a creative agency) or Cabana (an online store currently closed) over the years. I have always been driven by the desire to know more and the will to share this acquired knowledge. Journalists, editors, and reporters alike are known for their restless spirit and willingness to discover the best stories, which are always better when printed on paper.

I intend to celebrate the best of the printed word in the Paper is not Dead newsletter. Through this medium, we can calmly absorb information without the distractions of online articles or social media. The newsletter is divided into several sections: book and magazines suggestions; a newsstand or bookshop; an interview with a journalist, editor, or creative; the perfect reading corner; rare finds and fine objects; the typeface of the month; and off-paper, where I publish the best of online storytelling.

I hope you enjoy the newsletter and return for the second issue. You can also share it with friends because celebrating the printed word is always a good idea!

Álvaro Ramos

Disclaimer: The Portuguese-to-English translation is not ultra-professional, so cut me some slack! :)

Magazine spread (top) — Robinson / La Repubblica

ENG — Casa Magazines is much more than a newsstand. It is a true cultural bastion in New York and a vital space for the West Village community. Founded by Mohammed Ahmed in 1994, Casa Magazines mirrors the diversity of the east coast metropolis through more than 2500 titles available at 22 8th Avenue, selling everything from leading newspapers and tabloids to independent magazines and established publications. For those far from NYC, it is possible to follow the latest news from Casa Magazines through Ahmed and his longtime collaborator Syed Khalid Wasim's (known as Ali) good mood, who celebrate the beauty of the printed word through the store's Instagram profile.

EN — I met the journalist Ivan Carvalho in Lisbon shortly after the first issue of Monocle was published in 2007 when he was looking for Portuguese brands to cover in the newly created magazine. Originally from California, Ivan Carvalho divides his time between Italy, where he has lived since 2003 and is a correspondent for Monocle in Milan, and Portugal, his father's home country, where he fell in love with the local food and wine. Having started his career as a journalist at Wired Magazine, Ivan Carvalho has collaborated with publications such as Icon, Studio, NetJets Magazine, or The New York Post, covering topics such as business, food, and wine. I caught up with Ivan to learn more about his relationship with the printed word, career, and favourite publications.

From top to bottom:
Magazine covers — Robinson / La Repubblica
Magazine spread — Linkiesta

What draws you to the printed word?
For me, the lure of print is the ease with which one can process a lot of information quickly. The example I always cite is reading the newspaper at my local café. In Italy, one can usually find a copy of the local news daily or sports paper at the counter that over the course of the day is read by a dozen or so people as they kill time while sipping their espresso. At my neighborhood café I can stand at the bar and flip through the 60-odd pages of Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily, and in a few minutes take in a wealth of information. Headlines and photo captions are easy to digest visually so I can quickly scan the news about local and international topics before moving on to the culture pages, opinion pieces, and lifestyle section. In a matter of minutes my eyes browse up and down the pages, catching the names of politicians in the spotlight, important figures in business as well as checking the weather report and perhaps having a laugh at the front-page comic by legendary cartoonist Emilio Giannelli. Graphs on inflation or population growth can be studied, the current standings of the Italian football league can be checked. Oh, and the advertisements are easy to see and tend to stick in my mind – remember how memorable those ‘shock marketing’ Benetton ads photographed by Oliviero Toscani were on the printed page. Today, an advert for a new car or handbag in a newspaper or monthly magazine still stays with us much more than the ugly pop-up ads that get in the way when we are trying to access a news website on our phone. That’s because the newspaper advert is allotted its own space next to editorial content and there’s no fear it will encroach on the news section.

So, after say 5 or 10 minutes of browsing Corriere della Sera I’ve scanned a wide range of articles, some with charts or graphs included that may provide me with a few extra nuggets of wisdom, and I can now relay today’s events to another person and hold a conversation. On our phones, we have a small sliver of real estate that needs to fulfill different purposes. Advertisers want to reach eyeballs and throw annoying banner ads at us; users also need to accept data privacy policies before accessing many sites. The news is condensed into snippets. In-depth coverage of a subject is impossible to gather on your phone whereas standing in the café I can read a double-page spread with charts, diagrams, engaging photography or illustrations and get a better handle on things. Infographics, which can be rich visual tools to explain abstract concepts in simpler terms, are hard to digest on a tiny screen given the limited amount of space. With print media I’m also never at risk of missing something on the page since everything is right in front of me. On your phone, you can easily skip over things as your finger does the endless scroll down the page.

I remember my first editorial job at Wired magazine in San Francisco back in 1999. Many might assume that the tech bible of Silicon Valley was all about delivering the latest product news but its editors were committed to first-class storytelling too. Besides excelling in long-form journalism and investing time and money in quality photography, Wired committed itself each issue to covering a topic – say datacenters or nuclear energy – by using a stunning infographic spread that prioritized clarity and smart visuals to translate complicated arguments onto the page. Today, unfortunately, much of the news people receive comes in short, bite-sized nuggets like candy. It gives us the bare minimum of sustenance but it’s not very nutritious. Our attention span, which already began to shrink with the introduction of the TV remote control, is getting shorter. On the subway, I often see people mindlessly swiping through images on Instagram or watching ridiculous TikTok videos where content is visually oriented and the written content is reduced to snarky comments about people or things.

What are your favourite publications?
Here in Italy, I enjoy reading the daily newspaper La Repubblica. Art director Francesco Franchi is a real talent and has a great eye. He creates engaging layouts for the paper. He had already blazed a trail with his work for Italian financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore, where he first developed his skill at putting together infographics and smart page designs for the paper’s monthly supplement, including columns that draw inspiration from 1950s & 60s tabloid magazines in Italy to create a colorful mix of content and visuals. At La Repubblica, he has overhauled the paper’s inserts with visual storytelling to make them covetable sections you want to keep and collect. He helped develop Robinson, the culture insert, whose covers are themselves works of graphic art. By mixing illustrations and photographs with a dynamic page design, he has helped revive the daily newspaper.

Another title that believes in the power of print is Linkiesta. Although it exists online as a digital news site, editor Christian Rocca, who previously oversaw IL magazine with Franchi, has embarked on a path to provide print supplements to accompany the news website that contain long-form think pieces and an attention-grabbing look with big bold designs and a nice splash of color.

Quarterly magazine Studio offers an A to Z look at society, both Italy and abroad, while mixing high-brow journalism on current affairs and pop culture with fashion editorials and film reviews. The publishers also put out a sports quarterly Undici that is unrivalled as they mix reportage with powerful images that goes beyond the typical sports reporting.

In Portugal, I love to pick up a copy of Público because of its compact format and also because of the well-researched pieces in its Fugas weekly insert on travel and food. Another favorite is the lifestyle publication Observador that has done an excellent job of showing off great retail, travel and food offerings.

For a long-haul flight, the latest issue of The New Yorker and The Economist helps to pass the time. One of the most remarkable, but often overlooked, columns in The Economist is the obituary page, especially when the editors select a person who is not a well-known figure from the world of politics or finance. They manage to dig up interesting personalities and provide fascinating anecdotes about their lives that really jumps off the page. This sort of detail is something to be cherished, particularly in today’s world of visual soundbites.

What would it be your dream story to cover?
What most interests me is exploring little-known places in the world and topics that are often misunderstood. I would select two actually, one lifestyle oriented and the other related to current affairs because I never like to focus on one sector, industry or topic – that’s the real joy of this line of work because we are given permission to enter into the world of a designer, chef or politician for a brief but intense moment and experience their world.

For my dream ‘lifestyle’ story, I would love to discover a place that time has forgot and what really interests me today is to venture to the far north of Portugal to a collection of taverns in the Alto Tâmega. These places recall, with their simple, rustic interiors and honest food, the Portugal of the past, one that has unfortunately been dismissed at times as the tourist boom in Lisbon and elsewhere in the country attempts to cater to international travelers by offering them what they expect rather than staying authentic to what makes Portugal unique. These interior areas need to be cherished because they are, in essence, the soul of the country. Foreign tourists go to Comporta in Portugal to stay in resorts that could have been designed elsewhere and dropped onto the landscape. That’s not my idea of traveling. Travel should be a discovery.

The other story I would like to explore in more detail is the migrant route from North Africa into Europe. Once, for Monocle, I spent time in Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island in the Mediterranean closer to the African continent than Sicily that had become a hot spot for the immigration debate in Europe. Today, with the rise of right-wing governments concerned about the arrival of refugees to Europe, this topic needs to be explored in more detail by going back to the towns and villages where these migrants come from in order to understand the reasons behind their desire to uproot and head north. These are often places far from the North African coast as I had met in Lampedusa individuals who had journeyed from as far away as Nigeria.

Despite never having visited the Eames House (also known as Case Study House No. 8) in California, this house designed and constructed by husband-and-wife Charles & Ray Eames is one of the buildings that strikes me the most. Through its simplicity, openness and communication with the outside, the Eames House was created on a human scale with one purpose: to be a unique place to live and welcome friends and family without any pretensions or excesses. In the whole house, the corner that has always drawn my attention is the reading area, where a large bookshelf designed by the Eames serves as a resting place for their extensive book collection.

Catalan artist Bea Sarrias painted this room of the house, capturing its incredible natural light, the exterior vegetation, and some of the objects that form part of the designer couple's creative universe. I spoke with Bea Sarrias to find out what motivated her to paint this space:

"I am specialized in painting architecture because, for me, architecture is the best tool to paint light. I feel a special predilection for the modern movement or, in this case, the Case Study Houses, of which the Eames House is a part. They are a type of architecture that plays very well with the interior-exterior and with the human measure of architecture. Through the light, I capture the soul of spaces. That’s why I say that I don't paint architecture, I portray spaces. Before I paint a house I make an anthropological search. For the Eames House I have documented its construction and the life of the Eames.
The Eames House is a lived-in house and the objects, especially the books, give humanity to the space. Through the objects and the books I can say that I portray the people who have inhabited, built or visited that house. The Eames House, and especially the reading area, has all the characteristic elements of my work: interior, exterior, nature, furniture, books, and above all the light".

It's no secret that Azo Sans is one of my favourite typefaces, being used on the O Editorial website. “Azo Sans is a new geometric grotesque loosely based on the elementary forms of geometry. It is constructed in a geometric manner inspired by the constructivist typefaces of the 1920's, but is instilled with a humanistic quality,” as described by its creator, the Portuguese designer Rui Abreu.

Mensagem de Lisboa is proof that local journalism has a future and is vital to tell the stories of a city or territory. Mensagem was created by a group of Lisboans, who happen to be journalists, aiming to improve the city. In the online newspaper, it is possible to read stories about Lisbon, its residents, the problems the Portuguese capital faces, and reports of hope, diversity, and integration. Mensagem de Lisboa is a meeting point and exchange of ideas between all locals, those born here or those who came to Lisbon later but want to live in a better city. You can support the quality journalism of Mensagem de Lisboa here and become a neighbour, just like me!

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