A Mythological Hand with 45 Fingers. The Olivetti Advertising Of fice in the 1930s Giuliana Altea (&) Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche e Sociali, Università di Sassari, Sassari, Italy altea@uniss.it Critical interest in Olivetti has never been so strong. Studies on the Ivrea company continue to stream in from a diverse range of fields including economic history, the history of social thought, that of literature, that of architecture and those of design, and graphic design. 1 With regard to the latter discipline, however, and in particular the theme of the overall definition of the company’s image in the second half of the 1930s, the picture is still unclear, in spite of growing scholarly interest. Beyond general and broadly agreed upon points, there is a dearth of solid information reconstructing the early years of the Olivetti Advertising Of fice. The organization of the work, the rela- tionships between the collaborators, and their respective roles in producing the material all remain hazy. There are various reasons for this historiographic dif ficulty: a scarcity of relevant documents in the Olivetti archive; the proverbial reticence of the only major figure from that period who lived long enough to theoretically be of assistance, Gio- vanni Pintori (in part because one of the effects of the success of his late work was to obscure his beginnings); but also and most importantly the basic approach that gov- erned the company’s activity, namely the tendency to privilege collective over indi- vidual work and the overall nature of the project over individual contributions. Right from the beginning, in 1931, the first director of the Advertising Of fice Renato Zvet- eremich cautioned against the use of “unilateral intelligences,” deemed overly focused on a single goal. 2 Within the of fice, each and every design task was shared and conceived as an integral part of the company’s broader operational horizon. While this holistic approach to design can be an obstacle today to acquiring accurate, detailed historical knowledge, it is also one of the most interesting aspects of the Olivetti vision, an element that reconnects it to Milanese culture between the wars. During the 1930s, Adriano Olivetti led the Ivrea company in the launch of an inno- vative business policy, guided by a social philosophy that touched every area, from production to city planning, from the design of a product to its presentation, all the way up to communication. When the Advertising Of fice moved to Milan in 1932, the new of fice located at via Clerici 4 and headed by Zveteremich, it marked a turn in the company’s communication strategy. Its language was updated in a modernist key, beginning with projects entrusted to artists like Erberto Carboni, Luigi Veronesi, Ricas (Riccardo 1 Recent studies include: De Giorgi and Morteo (2008), Fiorentino (2014), Toschi (2018), Carter (2018, 2019). 2 Zveteremich, Organizzazione Uf ficio Pubblicità Olivetti, company document, 1931, Archivio Olivetti, Ivrea. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 E. Cicalò (Ed.): IMG 2019, AISC 1140, pp. 1–15, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41018-6_4