October 2025
There are places within a company that do not appear on organizational charts, floor plans, or balance sheets. Places born out of affection, respect for knowledge, and the desire to share it. At ITV, one of those places was our library.
It was not just a corner filled with shelves and books. It was a space for pause and inspiration. The LITERATURA library — which had accompanied so many calm moments among machines, projects, and meetings — held a universe of stories, technique, and art. There, engineering manuals, refrigeration treatises, and marketing and industrial design guides lived side by side with books on history, fashion, art, and literature. There were also the books of Octavio Cordón, my father and our founder — volumes full of notes and reflections that today are worth more than any technical manual.
We also kept unique albums, incunabula, and something even more valuable: the visual history of our workshop. Day after day, Octavio Cordón and Vicente Mascarell photographed its construction, leaving behind a graphic testimony of how the heart of ITV was born. Those images were more than memories; they were the testament of a dream made into a factory.
On the night of October 29th, that library fell silent. When the water entered, it did so without asking permission, without recognizing the value of what it touched. In a few hours, everything we had gathered over the years — more than three hundred books, albums, documents, and photographs — became an unrecognizable mass of paper and mud. The mixture of water, ink, and time turned into one thing: a dense, gray, irreparable paste.
There was no way to save them. Each page, each image, each cover dissolved in the hands of those who tried to rescue something. It was an intimate loss, deeper than it might seem. Because that library was a symbol of who we are: curious, lifelong learners, seekers of beauty and knowledge.
Today, amid sadness and determination, we have decided to rebuild it. We are buying books again, recovering some titles, ordering others that are impossible to replace. We want that space to exist once more — a place that reminded us that knowledge is not meant to be kept, but shared.
We will not be able to recover everything. Some volumes, some photographs, will be lost forever. But the essence — the spirit of learning, of looking beyond the machine, of reading the world with curiosity — remains intact. And as long as we continue to believe in it, the ITV library will rise again, book by book, as a symbol that neither water nor mud can wash away what truly defines us.
Cristina