Farewell to Ulrico Carlo Hoepli, the last guardian of the book dynasty

A coincidence that makes it all the more difficult to dismiss this as mere news. Ulrico Carlo Hoepli, aged 91, a fourth-generation member of the dynasty of booksellers and publishers that has shaped the city’s cultural history, has died just as the bookshop in Via Hoepli, a stone’s throw from the Duomo, is closing its doors.

He had been admitted to the Policlinico hospital with bilateral pneumonia, before being transferred to a hospice. With him passes the man who, for decades, held together family memory, craft and pride. He often told the story of the founder, Ulrico Hoepli, who in 1930 donated the Planetarium to Milan, investing a large part of his savings. To his grandchildren, who were worried about the cost, he replied that they were already lucky: they had a place to work.

That place is now almost gone. The bookshop has closed down for good and the building must be vacated by 30 June. Offices, storerooms, books: everything must be cleared out. It is the most painful chapter in a story that has come to a head due to family disputes and liquidation, after 156 years of history.

Ulrico Carlo, father to Barbara, Giovanni and Matteo, had been part of Hoepli’s entire post-war journey. As a young man, he saw the publishing house rise from the ashes after the bombs destroyed the warehouse. Then, in the 1960s, after graduating in law, he joined his father in running the business, developing the reference book and bookshop divisions. With typical Swiss pragmatism, he called it ‘a shop’: a place where things are sold. Books, in fact. But books that were well-made, beautiful, carefully produced, almost handcrafted.

He was also a man of the institutions: a member of the SIAE board, treasurer of the AIE, and president of the European Publishers’ Federation. In 2001, he launched hoepli.it, one of Italy’s first online bookshops. He believed in technology, but without losing his love of paper.