“United in isolation. An online letterpress festival”. A community response to the Covid-19 pandemic

This contribution aims to investigate the experience of 'United in isolation. An online letterpress festival’ which was held during the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and its subsequent development. In recent years, letterpress has experienced a renaissance: at an international level, several realities have recovered and reused machinery and tools of this ancient technique for quite different purposes. As this is a specific field that is only explored by a few people, the community has developed strongly and reached an international dimension. Starting from the initiative of a few individuals, a weekly festival has been organised, in which in each episode four or five printers from different parts of the world streamed live from their workshops, showing spaces and tools that are difficult to share publicly in any other way. The ten episodes were well received by the public, representing a concrete response in terms of human relations and the advancement of specific knowledge on the subject. The online archive that was created represents an important starting point for the study of the contemporary letterpress, as well as the repository of an irreplaceable network for issues such as the history of typography and printing.