About |
We are Matteo Barbuti and Riccardo Crippa, two Italian graduate students with a great interest for and focus on history and cultural diffusion.
Riccardo is an antique book expert and had the opportunity to work for some of the most important dealers and auction houses in the sector where he discovered the quality of old printing and the emotions that antique books can communicate.
Matteo spent his senior high school year in the USA in 2012, he unconditionally fell in love with the country and its culture. He truly wanted to give something back to the country that treated him so well. So, being very keen on the new social and sharing economy he decided with Riccardo to launch “The Columbus Letter” project on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.com.
The idea of reproducing the Columbus Letter surged after observing the reactions of people reading and admiring the pages of antique texts. Even if they are extremely fascinated and attracted by the beauty and meaningfulness of the text they still felt a significant gap between them, caused by the idea that Bibliophily is a hobby for a small elite. Even if public libraries try to attract people and make them discover their antique and precious treasures the barrier is always hard to overpass.
For this reason, we started thinking about the best possible way to diffuse the knowledge and fascination of antique texts to a broader public. We finally decided to make antique books physically reachable for everyone by reprinting them with the same techniques and materials as those employed centuries ago by typographers. We strove to make the letter as accurate as possible and to offer it at the lowest price in order to give everybody the chance to purchase it.