The Amsterdam University holds several special collections (“bijzondere collecties”) including one for graphic design and typography. 

This collection domain relates primarily to the industrial era, i.e. the period from circa 1830 onwards. It covers writing (calligraphy and type design) and the production and design of books, posters and other printing. The collection is internationally oriented collection and also includes secondary literature.

The basis for this collection domain was laid in 1958 with the acquisition of the Library of the Book Trade (Bibliotheek van het Boekenvak), an extremely broad collection on the history of the book focusing, among other things, on design and production. A major acquisition, in 1971, was the Typografische Bibliotheek (Typographical Library) of Lettergieterij Amsterdam, voorheen N. Tetterode (Type Foundry Amsterdam, formerly N. Tetterode). The core theme of this collection is the design and production of printed material, but it also contains archive material relating to fonts designed by Tetterode, including drawings by S.H. de Roos and Jan Tschichold. Besides specialist literature, the Typografische Bibliotheek also houses numerous unusual specimens: from woodcut to heliogravure and from Bodoni’s Manuale tipografico to illustrated corporate books.

Since the 1950s, the library has actively sought to acquire the archives of various designers and organisations. The acquisition of the archive of Jan van Krimpen was followed by those of Charles Jongejans, Atie Siegenbeek van Heukelom, Harry N. Sierman, Jan van Toorn and Irma Boom. This material covers a period of over a century.

Important collections:

• Collection Tetterode

• Collection Stichting De Best Verzorgde Boeken

• Collection calligraphy

• Collection Dutch industrial bindings of A.S.A. Struik

• Collection English book art 1750–1850 of Fons van der Linden

• Archive Irma Boom

• Archive Jan van Krimpen

• Archive Otto Treumann

• Archive Jurriaan Schrofer

• Collection Gerrit Noordzij

• Collection Bram de Does

• Collection Rijksoverheidletter (Peter Verheul)

• NAGO archives

Atelier-Musée Imprimerie (AMI) is a large printing museum in Malesherbes, 70 kilometers South of Paris. Created by Jean-Paul and Chantal Maury it offers 5,000 square meters of exhibition space including workshops where visitors can make paper or learn the arts and crafts of paper marbling, type composition, printing and bookbinding. The 700 objects on display include 150 machines. 

The Book Art Museum is a library of knowledge about the history and the future of a book. In fact it is a library of “books about books” which have been collected since the beginning of the museum. Most of the books, due to the poor condition of the building (leaking roof, for example) are stored in boxes. Library equipment is being collected as well (mainly donations), however not as intensely as we would like due to the unclear legal status of the building. The “Library of books about books” is waiting for administration decisions and so far it has been created virtually. It consists of Polish and German “books about books” donated to BAM in 2011 by professor Alfred Świerk from Mainz (more than 1200 items), of Polish and foreign publications collected by the Tryznos, as well as the catalogues of the book art exhibitions collected by Alicja Słowikowska.

The main themes are: technologies (printing, binding, paper-making), history of a book (of writing, illustrating, ornamenting), history of art (artists, styles, trends), new media (e-books, experiments), encyclopedias, compendia, dictionaries. At the moment there are but two registers available: the one made by Dominika Biernat for her MA thesis, and of the books donated by professor Alfred Świerk.

The direct access to the books will be possible after the renovation, when a few rooms will be prepared for this function. The OK'ART library is a separate part of the “library of books about books”; it both collects and initiate publications “about artist's books”. It consists of critical papers accessible non-abridged at the Museum website. The first papers were written as referring to the collection of “Polish artists' books from the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries”. The OK'ART Library will enlarge as new papers are sent from Poland and abroad. The texts will be in Polish and English.

During two decades there were many exhibitions at the Museum, both Polish and foreign ones. The Museum showed also its collections in many venues in Poland and abroad.

The British Printing Museum is a comprehensive private museum collection of letterpress printing equipment with working press exhibits dating from 1860 up to the 1960s.

Open to the public by prior arrangement and to industry and education groups for meetings, workshops and demonstrations, the museum collection is based upon some of the original presses, type, wood letter and printing blocks used by The Portland Press, Mablethorpe from the 1940s and added to significantly.

Activities include:

• Letterpress workshops – on an ad hoc basis

• Letterpress typesetting / printing courses – arranged for individuals or small groups

• Educational tours, active, fun with small creative workshops

• Activities for students of all ages and abilities – curriculum related

• Disabled access and facilities with special guided tour for the visually impaired

The Buchstabenmuseum (“Museum of Letters”) was founded in 2005. It is a non-profit organization and devoted to preserving and documenting letterforms. Hundreds of signs have alredy been rescued from decay and the scrap heap. They are now on display in Berlin. The current address is Holzmarktstraße 66, near Alexanderplatz. 

The C.C. Stern Type Foundry is a non-profit working museum of metal type and casting equipment founded in 2009 and located in Portland, Oregon. Its mission is to preserve the heritage of America’s typecasting industry; educating people in the history of metal type and typography, its continued design influence and modern applications; and inspiring graphic artists and printers to pursue new directions using traditional practices. The Museum of Metal Typography provides a gathering place for type enthusiasts from all genres of study, connecting them with the Northwest’s printing history, as well as with national and international organizations devoted to typography, type casting and printing.

The Crandall Historical Printing Museum offers a museum of printing methods as well as hands-on exhibits. It is a living documentary of the role the written and printed word has had on history. The museum features replicas of famous historic shops and presses including a re-creation of the world’s oldest printing house. Watch as type is cast and a page of the Gutenberg Bible is printed. See Benjaman Franklin’s Printing House and the Grandin Print Shop where the first Book of Mormon was printed.  

Leipzig is a city with rich traditions of bookmaking and publishing. The Druckkunst-Museum (“Museum of the Printing Arts”) is unique for the scope and diversity of its exhibits. The outstanding feature of this museum is that all appliances, tools and machines are not presented as mute testimonies to their time, but as vivid working demonstrations of a wide range of techniques. Hands-on experimentation plays a major role, making the museum ideal as a platform for courses and workshops. A further dimension is added by independent artists, who are invited to use the facilities for their work. And as a museum open to the public, the Museum of the Printing Arts Leipzig welcomes everyone interested in the art of printing, gives room to temporary exhibitions and provides a venue for lectures and symposia.

This Museum of the Art of Printing  is situated in the centre of Maastricht. It is located in a 19th-century house with an inner courtyard and a chapel building. Here you will find a unique historic printing establishment dating from 1900.
The museum offers a historic overview of the art of printing, with the help of various materials and tools, ranging from the first bookblocks to etchings by Rembrandt and litho prints by de Toulouse-Lautrec. Several old printing presses are still operational.

The chapel shows various exhibitions focusing on the art of printing. Besides the historical art of printing, the museum has an exclusive collection of modern art, that consists of graphic art, drawings and objects in the characteristic style of artist and initiator of the museum, René Glaser.

The museum is open:

• for individuals from March till July and Sept. till Nov.
  • each Saturday from 13-17 hrs.
  • The museum is closed for individual visits in August.
• Guided tours for groups are possible throughout the year and on a daily bases, but by appointment only!

The Estonian Printing Museum hosts a collection of letterpress presses, typefaces and other printhouse machinery from mid-19th to late 20th century. The soul of the museum is however the activities in workshops, from printing your own postcard to working on a linocut art print. It does not matter what age you are or whether you can draw. As longs you know your ABC, there is a lot of ways to explore your creative side and learn something about the art of printing in the process.

Officially the museum is open Wednesday to Sunday, 11:00 - 18:00. But we are here at other times too, so do not hesitate to call or email us if you'd like to come any other time. We speak English, but will also manage in Russian and Finnish. If we know in advance, we can organise for Hungarian, German, French, Persian or Arabic to be spoken.

The museum started, as many good initiatives, not from long term planning, but rather of lucky coincidences. In the spring of 2004 a couple of well-known Estonian graphic artists and printmakers Reiu Tüür and Marko Mäetamm turned to us in Kultuuritehas Polymer in Tallinn – back then a newly established center for artists-in-residence, exhibition and performance platform. Their concern was salvaging equipment from an old printing workshop in the process of merging with a more modern company. More than 20 pieces of machinery including a large format cilinder press Victoria 1040 were moved over to their present location including a full set of wooden letters and Ludlow matrices. Printing of posters was continued with only a few weeks interruption spent on reassembling the equipment. Two ladies of the original personnel were transferred to the payroll of the museum, thus enabling the Printing Museum to claim non-stop continuation of the history of the original printing company started in 1633.

During its existence the museum has aquired several collections and separate pieces of letterpress machinery, other equipment and literature from discontinued printing factories, private collections of retired printers and other organisations.

In 2008 as a result of a large donation in the town of Tartu in southern Estonia an independent collection was established there in 2008. 

As a legal body the Estonian Museum of Printing was established in 2010 by two private persons daily active in the managing and leadership of the museum.

The book has shaped our culture and civilisation like no other medium. For centuries our knowledge about the world and its peoples has been stored, handed down and updated in books. The task of the German Museum of Books and Writing (Deutsches Buch- und Schriftmuseum) is to collect, exhibit and process evidence of book and media history. Founded in 1884 as the Deutsches Buchgewerbemuseum (German Book Trade Museum), it was integrated in the Deutsche Bücherei in 1950 following the loss of its building and some of its stock in World War 2. It is the oldest book culture museum in the world, and also one of the most important with regard to the scope and quality of its collection.

The main focus of the museum’s work today is on the book and its myriad aspects: as an ingenious invention and as the product of economic and technical processes, as a social icon and the most important vehicle of culture, as a work of art and as a censored and burned repository of ideas. Even after the transition to the era of digital networks, the museum has two main functions. It is a museum which acts as an academic documentation centre for book and media history. But it is also an inviting and vibrant place of cultural education, aimed at bringing culture to a wider audience and attracting visitors with its exhibitions and educational programmes.

The opening of the 4th annex building of the German National Library in Leipzig sees the German Museum of Books and Writing enter a new era. Air-conditioned store rooms, expanded work areas and generously proportioned public areas provide optimum conditions for the long-term storage and use of the collection. A modern reading room houses the specialist library and more than one million museum objects for research, study and practical use. The new display vault features a small selection of special collection items, ranging from medieval manuscripts and early Bible prints through to unique artists' books. The museum gallery is aimed at younger users aged between 6 and 16 in particular, and provides them with an opportunity to learn all about writing, books and paper in a more informal environment.

Serving as a showcase for the German National Library, the museum’s new permanent exhibition provides an insight into 5000 years of media history. Entitled “Characters—Books—Networks: From Cuneiform to Binary Code”, it spans everything from the rise of early writing systems via bookprinting with movable type through to the digital online world, and also offers a light-hearted overview of the future of the information society. As a supplement to the permanent exhibition, the virtual exhibition features trenchant histories, pictures, films and sound recordings related to 5000 years of human and media history.

Holdings

A network of collections which have developed gradually over a long period of time forms the basis of the museum’s function as a scientific archive and centre for research into the history of writing, books and paper and as a vibrant location for exhibitions and information on book and media culture. The State of Saxony laid the foundations for the collection of prints in 1886 when it purchased the 3,000 historical copies of the Dresden tailor, publisher and book collector Heinrich Klemm's extensive collection. Numerous, and in some cases substantial, donations of major collections played an important role in the systematic expansion of the holdings (see Chronicle).

The museum suffered heavy losses in the Second World War. The most valuable items of the Klemm collection were in storage elsewhere at the time (manuscripts, incunabula including a 42-line Gutenberg Bible and a valuable collection of book cover and cloth prints) and were confiscated by the Soviet occupying force in September 1945. These holdings have been held ever since by the Russian State Library in Moscow.

Today the museum's stocks encompass over a million exhibits, safeguarded in the ideal environment of the modern stores in the annex building of the German National Library. Historical prints and modern book art, individual graphic sheets and series, watermarks, decorated paper, paper samples and sample books, records and documents on the history of books and paper, early writing surfaces and book forms, writing instruments, small graphic utensils and machines for the manufacture of fonts, books and paper are at the heart of the highly informative collection of samples. In their specifics and interconnected content, the collections and the reference library provide an extraordinarily complex and interdisciplinary insight into book, writing and paper-related issues which also takes into account the historical contexts in terms of culture, media and communication.

The Grafiska Museet is a printing museum with working letterpress machines (platen presses, Typograph, Linotype) in Linköping, Sweden. The museum also offers workshops and exhibitions. 

Gray’s Printing Press is located behind an 18th-century shop front in the heart of Strabane, once the famous printing town of Ulster. It is here that the printer of the American Declaration of Independence is said to have learned his trade.

The collection includes 19th century printing machinery and a fine collection of wood and metal type. The items can also be browsed online. 

The Museum of Typography is located in the Park of Local Industries in Souda, Crete. It constitutes the life vision of its founder, Yannis Garedakis, founder and editor of the newspaper “Haniotika nea”.

The Museum of Typography officially opened its gates in May 2005. The museum collection includes hard to find, cast iron printing presses and other machines, as well as tools and objects that present the development of typography from birth, in the days of Gutenberg, up to our days. Rare books and newspapers, as well as our precious lithographies, travel the visitor in the art of Typography.

The effort for the enrichment of the museum with new exhibits and the contact with people of Typography are continuous. In April 2012 the museum was extended by adding a new wing with collection exhibits that are related to the development of graphic arts, as well as two important exhibitions regarding the evolution of typography and the history of writing.

During guided tours children and adults have the opportunity to print on the old printing presses.

One of the world's oldest museums for printing, the Gutenberg Museum invites visitors on a journey through four millennia of book, printing, and script culture. From cuneiform inscriptions to modern typography, from manuscripts to printing presses, from a reconstruction of Gutenberg's workshop and two original Gutenberg Bibles to the print shop (Druckladen), the museum's educational project space, the permanent and special exhibitions offer a comprehensive overview of all aspects of   the "black art".

A treasury of books, printing, and script history

The museum is primarily dedicated to Johannes Gutenberg, a native of Mainz and  "Man of the Millennium" , who invented printing with movable metal type more than 550 years ago, initiating a media revolution. In addition to comprehensive information about his life, work, and inventions, as well as their reception and consequences, the museum, which was founded in 1900 by citizens of Mainz, presents all aspects of letterpress printing.

At the heart of the permanent exhibition there are two copies of the world-famous 42-line Gutenberg Bible that can be viewed and compared in the walk-in vault. Technical printing tools, typesetting machines, and printing presses from several centuries bring the history of printing to life. Unique examples of the European book culture from the 15th century to this day exemplify the visual and thematic diversity of one of cultural history's most important chapters.

World Museum for the Art of Printing

As a "World Museum for the Art of Printing", the Gutenberg Museum has established separate sections for the earliest history of printing in East Asia (since the 8th century), as well as scripts and printing in the Islamic World. A manuscript section explains the development of scripts, while other sections are dedicated to the history of presses, the craft of bookbinding, fine press printing techniques, as well as the manufacturing of paper and colors.

With its collection of several hundreds of thousands of items, many award-winning special exhibitions and innovative cultural touristic (facilitation) offers, the Gutenberg Museum annually brings more than 140,000 visitors from around 70 countries to Mainz where they can witness the entire universe of printing across an exhibition area of around 3,500 square meters.

The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum is the only museum dedicated to the preservation, study, production and printing of wood type. With 1.5 million pieces of wood type and more than 1,000 styles and sizes of patterns, Hamilton's collection is one of the premier wood type collections in the world. In addition to wood type, the Museum is home to an amazing array of advertising cuts from the 1930s through the 1970s, and all of the equipment necessary to make wood type and print with it, as well as equipment used in the production of hot metal type, tools of the craft and rare type specimen catalogs.

Located between the East and West Twin Rivers on Lake Michigan, the Hamilton Manufacturing Company was the largest wood type producer in the country, when virtually everything was letterpress printed. The company was founded in 1880, and in addition to wood type, the company has manufactured medical office furniture, light tables, the first gas powered clothes dryer (really!) and more; now in its 130th year, the company produces steel lab equipment.

Thanks to Our Volunteers

Established and managed by the Two Rivers Historical Society, the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum is in its fourteenth year as a living museum. The Museum is operated by staff and volunteers of the Two Rivers Historical Society, many of whom are part of the history of Hamilton, as former employees. We are quite lucky to have among them former type cutters, trimmers, and sales staff, who are helping us tell the story!

"We have benefited from the life experiences of the many people who actually made the exquisitely detailed wood type and who still reside in Two Rivers," says Jim Van Lanen, Sr., the founder of the Museum. "These people are in their 70s and 80s. They show us, from memory, how the type workshop really operated - the old secrets that make these extraordinarily beautiful and distinctively American alphabets."

A Working Museum

The Museum, at 45,000 square feet, is no doubt one of the largest fully functional workshops in the world. Not only do the thousands of visitors who come through every year get to see how wood type was made at the factory, students, artists, typographers and designers visit to take workshops and actually put their hands on and use the collection to create works of art and scholarship in our pressroom at the Museum. To be able to use the type and cuts and a press to make a print can broaden a design student's understanding of typography and color and layout, and artists make work with wood type that would have surprised and delighted Ed Hamilton, the company's founder.

Opened in 1985, The Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography was created in order to preserve an unprecedented resource, Herb Lubalin’s vast collection of work. Its goal was to provide the design community with a means to honor Lubalin, and to study his innovative work.

Herb Lubalin (1918–1981) is best known for his wildly illustrative typography and his groundbreaking work for the magazines Avant Garde, Eros, and Fact. The Study Center's core collection includes an extensive archive of his work, including promotional, editorial and advertising design, typeface designs, posters, logos, and other other materials dating from 1950 to 1980. 

The collection also includes work by other eminent designers including Otl Aicher, Rudi Baur, Anthon Beeke, Lucian Bernhard, Lester Beall, Will Burtin, Lou Dorfsman, Karl Gerstner, Tibor Kalman, Alvin Lustig, The Push Pin Studios, Paul Rand, Bradbury Thompson, Massimo Vignelli, and many more. There is also a library of books and magazines about design and typography, an extensive collection of posters, myriad type specimen books and pamphlets.

The Study Center is located at The Cooper Union 41 Cooper Square, Room LL119, New York. The Lubalin Center is free and open to the public by appointment.

The “Historische Drukkerij Turnhout” is a printing museum in the city of Turnhout in Belgium. It opens every other sunday (free of charge) or by appointment. 

The Imprenta Municipal is a printing museum in Madrid. Its origin dates from 1853, with the establishment of Saint Bernardino Orphanage Printing Office to supply the printing needs of the City Council. The building was designed in 1931 and opened in 1933 for use as a printing office. It is an interesting example of Rationalism and Art Deco style. In 2009 it was refurbished to be used as a printing museum.

The Imprenta Municipal material collection is a very rich one, with historical machines and other artefacts related to graphic arts. Some of them are displayed in the permanent exhibition, Printing and the book, a story, that is located on the ground floor, offering visitors an agreable promenade through the sections dealing with the hand press printing period, the industrial age,  illustration techniques and the bindery.

On the first floor a temporary exhibition room and workshop spaces open to the public.

One of the most important features of the museum are the professional typography and bookbinding workshops which are a means of preserving the skills and techniques which are the non-material heritage of printing.

From its opening as a museum at the end of 2011, the Imprenta Municipal has developed an ongoing programme of temporary exhibitions about written culture, book and printing history and the graphic arts, accompanied by many lectures and public workshops.

The International Printing Museum in Carson, California is a public non-profit organization and was founded in 1988 by David Jacobson and Ernest A. Lindner. It is a museum devoted to bringing the history of books, printing and the book arts to life for diverse audiences. The staff and volunteers make it their mission to take one of the world’s most significant collections of antique printing machinery and interpret it for today’s audiences through working demonstrations and theater presentations.

Since 1988, the museum has reached over 250,000 people, both those visiting the Museum and those we have visited via History in Motion, the Museum’s schools outreach program, and taught about the history of books and printing, great inventions and inventors that helped make our world. 

 The museum does a lot of consulting for Hollywood and has provided rentals of vintage printing presses for numerous television and movie productions.

From the invention of typesetting with moveable types by Gutenberg in the middle of the fifteenth century, until the advent of the computer some five hundred years later, printing had been a highly skilled but labour intensive process. The John Jarrold Printing Museum is a window on the many hours and variety of skills that were involved in printing before they were made obsolete by advancing technology. The Museum is open from 09.30 to 12.30 every Wednesday and by special arrangement. 

The Klingspor-Museum Offenbach is a museum for Modern International Book Art, Typography and Calligraphy. 

On 7. November 1953 the Klingspor-Museum opened its doors to visitors the first time. During the post-war years the City of Offenbach am Main founded a small museum for the art of modern book production and typography. The basis of the museum was the valuable collection of books of Dr. h.c. Karl Klingspor (1868–1950), who together with his brother Wilhelm operated a typefoundry in the first half of the 20th century in Offenbach am Main.

Notable artists like Otto Eckmann, Peter Behrens, Rudolf Koch, Walter Tiemann, Rudo Spemann, Imre Reiner, Hans Bohn and Karlgeorg Hoefer designed typefaces for the company. The firm’s high artistic typesettings were exported to printers around the globe from its location in the Offenbacher Ludwigstrasse; the Gebrüder Klingspor type foundry was world reknowned.

In 1927 at the International Book Art Fair in Leipzig, the private book collection of Dr. Karl Klingspor was exhibited as the “Room of a bibliophile” and much admired. To this day his collection of 100 books bound in leather by the bookbinder Ignatz Wiemeler is an invaluable gem of the Klingspor-Museum.

Shortly after establishment of the museum, the first important donations arrived. The families of Rudolf Koch (1876–1934) and Rudo Spemann (1905–1947) gave entire collections inherited from their estates, and the young museum soon became the central collecting point for modern typographic art. The expressive calligraphy, tapestries with types and book production of Rudolf Koch and his former students are evidence of a lively Offenbach School of Calligraphy of the 20th century.

The Klingspor-Museum owns a large part of the work of Ernst Schneidler (1882–1956), who founded the Stuttgart School. His students are also present, with works of Rudo Spemann, Werner Bunz, Georg Trump and Eva Aschoff. Vienna is represented by the unique collection of Rudolf von Larisch. The Klingspor Museum in Offenbach holds the largest collection outside of the Netherlands of work of the greatest Dutch printer and typographer Hendrik Nikolaas Werkman (1882–1945); with his experimental periodical “The Next Call” from 1923 to 1926 he was one of the most influential avant-garde typographer of the century.

Permanent and changing exhibitions with valuable items from the museum's own collections, as well as loans from artists and collectors, show the variety of the 20th century book and printing art on an international level

Visitors from all over the world come to Offenbach to see the exhibitions and the extensive collections of the modern book and typographical art. The library of the museum also boasts a number of tables where the collections can be worked with.

The Kner Printing Museum has been operating since 1970 in the former house of Imre Kner. The house was built in 1925, according to the sketches of the arhitect and graphic Lajos Kozma, in popular baroque style. The exhibition of the museum show the works of the members of Kner family and the history of the Kner press from its opening of 1882 up to our days. The museum operates only during the summer season. 

Izidor Kner founded his printing house in 1882. The founder and his sons were respected for their excellent quality of production and high artistic level. Between the two world wars, thanks to these principles, the name Kner came to represent the best publications of Hungary. The second world war put an end to the development of the printing house; several members of the Kner family became victims of the holocaust.

In 1949 the printing works were nationalised. 1963 saw a fusion between the printing house of Gyoma and another, Tevan of Békéscsaba. The large, newly created printing house took the name Kner, but the central office was at Bekescsaba. More recent changes of regime in Hungary were followed by changes at Gyoma also, and in 1992 the printing house became a private company.

Letterform Archive in San Francisco is a nonprofit center for inspiration, education, and collaboration in the letter arts. It serves existing & potential practitioners, students, and admirers of typography, calligraphy, graphic design, the history of written communication, and adjacent fields. It is open to all, free of charge. 

Letterform Archive shares its world-class collection with a global audience through visits; public events; courses, workshops, and lectures by visiting artists and designers; publications; exhibitions; and state-of-the-art photography.

The Letterpress Depot: a living museum of letterpress printing, typography, design, poetry and art – a working vintage letterpress printshop, with space for exhibits, demonstrations, workshops, events and meetings, as well as typographic research and printing projects – to be a resource available to the community.

Take a look back at the printing trade in an authentic atmosphere, with the smells of lead and ink. You can operate the machines and use the old tools which allowed during five centuries the reproduction of the writing and the image.

The Musée de l’Imprimerie houses various lithographs, typesetting apparatus and even early modern machines. Guided tours are conducted throughout the day, giving visitors an expert view on the significance of the machines.

A museum of the printing arts in Montréal, Canada. 

The Musée de l'Imprimerie is a museum in Lyon, France, with the mission of enhancing, conserving, documenting and valuing the heritage of printed books and graphic.

The Musee de l'Imprimerie was established in Lyon because Lyon had been a centre of printing and the book trade in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries and the city held large historical collections of books and the graphic arts. The museum was designed by the master printer and historian Maurice Audin, with the historian of the book, Henri-Jean Martin, then chief curator of the Library of Lyon. 

The Musée Imprimerie à Bordeaux is a museum for the printing arts in the French city of Bordeaux. 

The Museo Bodiano is dedicated to the work of Giambattista Bodoni, who founded la Stamperia Reale (the Royal Printing-house) in 1768. The museum features a thousand Bodoni editions, over 12,000 letters, and an extraordinary set of punches, dies and tools from the Stamperia Reale. 

(Photo: Antonio Tombolini CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The first book ever printed in Spain (a devotional book exalting the Virgin Mary) was made in Valencia in 1474. This museum was founded as a tribute to this event and is located in the El Puig de Santa María Royal Monastery. It has many extremely valuable facsimile books, as well as wooden presses, letter moulds, printers’ marks, hand-carved relief plates and printing implements from Gutenberg's era. Since the museum's creation in 1986, the collection has expanded thanks to the addition of private collections.

The Printing Trade section of the “Museum der Arbeit” is located on the first floor; this section looks at letterpress printing , the gradual mechanisation of the industry and its end. The exhibition focuses on the evolution of printing with movable type, a process that is over five hundred years old. To illustrate these complex processes and make them understandable, the museum has chosen three different approaches, which are presented here in three different rooms: workshops where various methods of typesetting and printing are presented; an educational room where visitors can try printing themselves; and, in the central aisle of the factory building, an exhibition of documents and artifacts that provide insight into the trade.

The starting point for this section is a montage of images and texts which shows what printing with movable type involves: the production of individual letters, typesetting, printing, and, finally, book binding. The display also provides an overview of the history of book printing since 1440, with the gradual mechanisation stages that took place. The era of manual work in book printing from 1440 to 1800 is shown with a casting instrument used for making type, a type shelf with a type case and a very special and rare item: a wooden screw press dating back to around 1780. These are items that dominated the printing industry for almost 350 years.

The first decisive change in printing took place in 1814 with the introduction of the high-speed press, a device that gradually took on in Germany around 1840. In the museum, it is represented by a machine made by Bohn & Herber in 1890, which demonstrates which tasks the press performed automatically, and those which still had to be performed by hand.

Setting up the forme, inserting and removing the paper, and monitoring the machine all remained tasks that were performed manually by workers. The incredible speed at which they had to work is specifically illustrated by the job of feeding the paper into the press, with up to 2,200 sheets needed per hour; this can be fully appreciated when seeing the Autodux press (built in 1962), which has a folding sheet-feeder, in operation. Feeding the paper into the press was traditionally a woman’s job in the printing trade, illustrating the clear gender divide that dominated in the workplace.

The centrepiece in this section is a Columbia press, a cast-iron, hand press where the handle and the counterweights helped to increase the printing pressure. It was built around the same time as the first high-speed presses and is therefore more of a niche product. It was probably preserved on account of its magnificent appearance: it is lavishly decorated with eagles, cornucopias, figures of Minerva, dolphins and caducei, i.e. all motifs from classic literature that symbolised the rich tradition of the book printer which flourished at the same time as high-speed presses appeared on the market and started posing a threat to their very existence. This, and other responses to change, can be traced in the documentation display. The museum also has a separate pressroom which is equipped with a Heidelberg rotary press and a Heidelberg platen press.

As printing became increasingly mechanised, engineers started looking at ways to automate typesetting, and the first successful mechanical compositors were introduced around 1890. The museum has three different types: a typograph which sets an entire line of type in one go; a monotype, which set individual letters; and the most widely used version, the linotype machine. All of these typesetting machines are in working order. The response of the manual typesetters to these new machines, which presented a serious and ultimately fatal blow to their profession, is documented in a collective wage agreement from 1900 which specifies that only skilled manual typesetters are to be allowed to operate these machines. The crowning glory in this part of the exhibition is a true rarity: a cylinder press from 1896 which was developed specifically for printing newspapers.

The museum is located in the attractive former residence of the Baron Van Westreenen van Tiellandt (1783-1848) and is devoted to the hand-written and printed book of the past and present. The external aspects of the book and the development of book design are the main focus. The museum organizes three to four temporary exhibitions a year on themes related to both the old and modern book.

The history of the book since the sixth century

The museum maintains an extensive collection of books from all periods of Western book history, starting with medieval manuscripts that are entirely written and illuminated by hand. An overview of the development of writing, layout and decoration of manuscripts can be seen in the distinctive book room where a selection of these superb volumes can be seen.
The book room itself is a unique example of nineteenth-century museum design and its original style remains entirely intact. In addition to medieval manuscripts, there are also examples of the earliest form of the printed book, known as incunabula. 
 

The house of a collector

The name Meermanno-Westreenianum refers to two individuals who were associated with the museum from the very beginning. The most important is Baron W.H.J.van Westreenen van Tiellandt (1783-1848) who built up his vast collection in this house, which was his residence. His second cousin and important source of inspiration, Johan Meerman (1751-1815), also owned an impressive collection of books, a part of which was taken up into the collection of Van Westreenen. After the death of Van Westreenen, the house and his entire collection became the property of the state. In 1852, the house was opened to the public as a museum.
Van Westreenen was a typical nineteenth-century collector who was very interested in the history of ancient cultures. He not only collected books, but also antiquities from, among other places, Greece, Rome and Egypt. He was successful in obtaining some extraordinary objects. In addition, family portraits and souvenirs from his extensive travels can be seen in the museum.
 

Modern books

As an extension of Van Westreenen’s collection, the museum actively collects books dating from 1850 to the present. The form and design of the book remain the criteria for selection. In the permanent installation, “From lead to LED,” the development of the modern book is presented, accompanied by a changing selection from the museum’s fine modern collection. In addition, the museum has a permanent display devoted to unusual book forms. An important part of this is the Bibliotheca Thurkowiana Minor, a miniature library with 1515 tiny books. Ex libris, printed bookplates identifying the owner of the book, are regularly shown in small changing displays. The museum has one of the largest collection of ex libris in the Netherlands.

2012 marked the 500th anniversary of Armenian printing. In honor of this 500 year history, the National Library of Armenia decided to create a museum about Armenian printing in order to show the importance of printing in Armenia’s history as well as to present the rich products that the National Library has.

The collection includes exhibits on antique books, history of Armenian printing, printing equipment, Clichés, printing machines and other subsidiary scientific research to provide for an interesting museum. In 2016, the museum was open to visitors in its new main exhibition. It will be equipped with new technologies to create an interactive environment for informal education.

The Museum of Printing in Armidale (Australia) houses a historically significant collection of printing machinery and equipment which comprise the FT Wimble & Co. Collection. The collection includes printing presses, a Linotype machine, guillotines, book binding equipment, wooden and metal type and a history of printing in Australia from 1850 to the early 1900s. There are over 1000 printing blocks and a comprehensive library of books on printing and technical manuals. Displays of small equipment and printed products change regularly.

The Museum of Printing is a must for anyone interested in the history of printing in Australia, or the importance of that industry to rural and regional New South Wales. It is also an ideal stop for schools with a curriculum which encourages students to think about the foundations of the technology they use today.

The Museum of Printing is downstairs at the New England Regional Art Museum in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. 

Open Thurs. & Fri. 10.30am – 3.30pm and by appointment.

Located in a 19th century building on the Moika River Embankment which housed various different editorial offices, including those of Pravda, the famous Communist newspaper, for six months in 1917, the Museum of Printing has a permanent exhibition which features the newspaper-making process. A collection of old printing equipment of the edge of the 19th–20th centuries is displayed in the publishing room.

The Museum Plantin-Moretus is unique. It is just as if after 440 years the working day is about to begin for the type founders, compositors, printers and proofreaders in the world-famous printing works. The oldest printing presses in the world are there, intact and ready to roll. The offices and shop echo with conversations between Christoffel Plantijn and aristocratic and scholarly clients from all over the world.

Feast your eyes on the home of the Plantin and Moretus families! Stroll through the drawing rooms, soaking up the atmosphere of life in Antwerp in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and admiring the impressive art collection which includes portraits by Peter Paul Rubens.

Continue on your way through the rarefied libraries lined with the breathtaking 30,000 old editions that make up the Moretusses’ collection. Marvel at the magnificent manuscripts and some of the finest examples of European typography.

Heritage comes alive

The Museum Plantin-Moretus/Print Room is a dynamic museum. Highlights from the collection are shown in special exhibitions and other displays. The workshops are a chance for everyone to try their hand at printing, etching or bookbinding. Visitors who have been granted access to the reading room for research purposes can study the books, prints and drawings. There are fun trails through the house for children and opportunities for them to discover their creative side. Finally, the walled garden is an oasis of peace, conducive to a moment of quiet reflection.

MATS is a Working Printing Museum in Sibiu, Romania, that shares the tools and skills to showcase and teach letterpress printing techniques.

The Printing Museum was established in 1996 to preserve and to protect the material and cultural values of the Cieszyn printing guilds. Its aim is also to commemorate the rich traditions of typography in the area of Cieszyn.

All the machinery is in perfect working condition. The museum is one of the best- equipped places of its kind in the entire country. It also collects all possible documents on the history of printing and on persons of merit in this field.

Beside visiting, the museum offers an especially elaborated programme for young visitors – pupils from primary and secondary schools. Within one hour they visit the museum and witness the creation of prints by an archaic way; from the types set by hand, then mechanically obtained cast of types to the final printout.

The Graphic Studio started in 2004.The graphic room offers special stands for designing and creating graphic works and is adapted for bookbinding workshops. Typographic workshops take place in an historic composing room and also offer examining the whole exhibition.

The National Print Museum collects, documents, preserves, exhibits, interprets and makes accessible the material evidence of the printing craft and fosters associated skills of the craft in Ireland.

History

With the advancement in new technologies in the 1980s, letterpress printing was being made redundant. A group of like-minded printers and typesetters, spear-headed by former compositor and union official Mr Sean Galavan, fortunately had the foresight to start collecting printing equipment.

In 1990 space was acquired at union offices on Gardiner Street in Dublin’s city centre and then in 1996 the Museum was officially opened by then President ,Mary Robinson, at the Old Garrison Chapel in Beggars Bush Barracks.

While traditional letterpress printing was made redundant in the commercial sense, the craft of letterpress is still very much alive. The Museum is a working museum with a panel of active retired printers and typesetters regularly maintaining and demonstrating the collection, and providing training.

In this digital age where information is at our fingertips, the National Print Museum affords the opportunity to step back in time to discover the traditional craft of letterpress printing and appreciate the importance of the invention of the printed word.

The Nederlands Drukkerij Museum (Dutch Printing Museum) is situated in Etten-Leur and presents the history of printing and book making. Exhibitions and printing and bookbinding workshops are also offered. 

The Pavillon-Presse is a museum of the printing arts in the city of Weimar, Germany. In the 2017 the museum opened a library with a focus on typography and type specimens. 

The Newspaper and Printing Museum preserves the equipment and methods of letterpress and linotype printing. The museum also holds an extensive collection of early newspapers from throughout Whitman County and has rotating exhibitions featuring artifacts and photographs from the region. While all of the equipment used by early-day printers is still operational, it is obsolete or unsuited to modern printing practices. This equipment and the extensive collection of county newspapers provide a unique opportunity for research in letter-press printing technology and in local history.

Roy M. Chatters was a retired nuclear engineer from Washington State University.  There was a printing background in his family however, and when he retired, he began a quest to collect antique printing equipment with the dream of setting up a working museum. Much of this equipment would simply have ended up in the scrap metal heap, as printers began turning to safer, more efficient methods of printing. Dr. Chatters loved tinkering with his machines, and sharing them with others.

Through the years, he also acquired a vast collection of newspapers from around the country, and especially Whitman County. There is a near-complete collection of Whitman County newspapers here in the museum, covering Endicott, LaCrosse, Garfield, Tekoa, Rosalia, St. John and of course, Palouse, dating back to the 1880s. These papers are available for research, with donations requested for this service. Colfax and Pullman newspapers maintain their own archives.

The museum was open for 20 years, until the flood of 1996 caused extensive damage to the wooden floor, and it was closed for safety reasons. We are proud to present it to you once again, new and refurbished, with the same spirit of paying tribute to the printers and newspaper editors who worked so hard to bring the only news available to their readers. It’s appropriate that the Roy M. Chatters Newspaper and Printing Museum re-opened on Palouse Day, as it was Palouse Day 1976 when it was first dedicated to J. B. and Olga West, who donated the building for use as a museum.

Since its inception in 1891 the Foundation has opened its doors to the people of Fleet Street, Farringdon and the surrounding areas and welcomed them into what was, and is, one of the most fascinating community focused organisations in the City of London.

The Foundation was originally designed to provide a social, cultural and recreational centre for local people with particular emphasis for those in the printing and associated trades.  Apart from the Printing School and outstanding technical library, the Foundation also housed a swimming pool, which we believe to be the first public swimming pool in the City of London as well as a gymnasium.

The Printing School moved to the south of the River Thames many years ago, but much equipment remains on site and is now being used, bringing the teaching of printing back to Fleet Street.  The St Bride Library is now generally acknowledged to be a world class resource with extensive collections relating to printing, typography and graphic design. Readers come from across the globe to delve into the archives.  

The Foundation has always prided itself on being there for local people and local charities.  Many of its beautiful rooms have always been available to the public for a variety of uses.  The impressive Bridewell Hall has been used for a huge variety of events on a regular basis.

Rooms for hire range from the small and intimate suitable for board meetings, to the grand and stately Salisbury Room which is not only in demand as a board room, but also for fine dining, tailor-made receptions, wedding and civil partnership ceremonies.

From classics to contemporary, the Bridewell Theatre offers evening programmes with something for everyone.  We play host to a variety of companies from the “Musical Theatre Academy and London School of Musical Theatre” to “London Ballet Company”, offering you, our audience, the opportunity to see the up and coming, the experienced, the amateur and the professionals tread our boards.

Finally, we have the Bridewell Bar, not just for drinks in the wee small hours, but other special events, including a gallery featuring artists and photographers.

In recent years the Foundation has experienced a total renaissance and is now a living and breathing community once again, in the heart of the City of London.

The doors are open to all and you will always be assured of a warm welcome.

The State Museum of Books and Book Printing of Ukraine was founded in 1972 and opened to the public in 1975. It is situated witthin the territory of  Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra (National Historic-Cultural Reserve) in the building of former printing house which was operating for over 300 years (from 17th to the early 20th century). 

The museum’s collection comprises over 58 thousand items: the unique handwritten manuscripts (15th-17th centuries), the first Ukrainian printed publications - “Apostle” (1574) and famous Ostrog Bible (1581). There are over 800 early printed books and incunabula, rare European publications, folios with covers made of precious materials, 18th-century wooden clichés. Some books are presented in a unique copy that could be found nowhere else in Ukraine. 

The Museum’s exposition represents the history of Ukrainian book, book publishing industry from the Kievan Rus to modern times. Visitors are given an insight on the origins of the written language of Eastern Slavs, invention of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets by Saints Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century, the usage of live Ukrainian language and specific font - “Ustav” - in handwritten books from the 11th to 16th centuries. During excurision the visitors will be able to find out more about the history of printing in Europe, publishing business of Ivan Fedoriv and other prominent Ukrainian and European publishers of 16th-18th centuries; multiple facsimile publications of famous handwritten books: “Anthologies of Sviatoslav” (1073), Reims Gospel (11th century), Ostromir Gospels (1056-1057), Peresopnytsia Gospel (1556-1561) and many other old printed  books of Lviv, Ostrog, Pochayiv, Chernihiv, Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra printing facilities. 

Items and articles of museum's collection cast light on the history of printing in Ukraine and its Diasporal centers throughout the world; documents, examples of typolithographic equipment, paper specimens, fonts, etc. Moreover, the museum hosts over 12000 originals of artists’ works dated back from the 17th century to the present day. Among them are masterpieces by V. Krychevskyi, I. Yizhakevych, M. Deregus, O. Hubarev, O. Danchenko, Georgiy Yakutovych, Serhiy Yakutovych, V. Lopata, M. Stratilat, V. Garbuz, V. Perevalskyi, M. Storozhenko, Y. Charyshnikov, K. Lavro and others.

The Museum of Lithography (Litografiska Museet) in Huddinge (Sweden) is a combined museum and workshop specialized in stone printing. The goal is to keep the art of lithography alive. With workshops, school activities, exhibitions and visiting lithographers the museum shows the original direct print in old presses and in the high speed printing press “Johanna” from the late 19th century. There are also artists in residence working at the museum. The museum owns a collection of art works, posters, labels, letterheads, packages etc. from the 20th century to the 1940s. There are also approximately 1,000 lithographic stones with the old motifs preserved on most of the stones.

The Museum of Printing is dedicated to preserving the rich history of the graphic arts, printing and typesetting technology, and printing craftsmanship. In addition to many special collections and small exhibits, the Museum contains hundreds of antique printing, typesetting, and bindery machines, as well as a library of books and printing-related documents.

A non-profit organization, the Museum was incorporated in 1978 as The Friends of The Museum of Printing, Inc., to save and preserve printing equipment and library materials associated with the graphic arts. The history of printing has changed dramatically during the last 200 years, moving away from letterpress printing to photographic and electronic technologies. We tell the stories of these changes using one of the world’s largest collections of printing and typesetting hardware and ephemera.

The Museum’s building contains a store, several galleries, two libraries, and meeting and workshop areas. The Main Gallery contains printing presses of all kinds. There are also two art galleries with rotating exhibits. The journey starts in the foundry era, which reaches back 500 years. Exhibits explain the transition from hand-setting individual sorts of foundry type to mechanized hot-metal typesetting and discusses the Linotype, Monotype and Ludlow linecasting machines. Along the tour route you’ll find a Monophoto and an Intertype Fotosetter, machines which attempted to use linecasting technology to transition to phototypesetting, only to fail in competition with the electronically-driven phototypesetters. There are also strike-on typesetters which produce inexpensive type which could be married to the expanding offset printing market.

The Museum is open every Saturday, 10am to 3pm in its new building in Haverhill, Mass.

The Type Archive holds the National Typefounding Collection, purchased with grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund; broadly comprising; 

1. the typefounding materials of the Sheffield typefounders, Stephenson Blake, a collection dating from 16th century London typefounders to their 20th century counterparts; 
2. the hot-metal archive and plant of the Monotype Corporation, operating from Salfords in Surrey from 1897, and in London's Lambeth from 1992 to date;
3. the Woodletter pattern collection and plant of Robert DeLittle in York from 1888, and in Lambeth from 1996.

The Type Archive’s collection spans the nearly 600 year period when the foundry cut letters in steel, drove them into brass blanks, and cast lead type from them in molten lead.

Tipoteca Italiana was established in 1995 to preserve and foster the arts of letterpress printing and handset typography. Its goal is to highlight the rich history and significant contributions of Italian type designers from the earliest days of printing, through the Industrial Revolution, to the present time.

Tipoteca houses not only an extraordinary collection of metal and hand-cut wood typefaces, but also maintains an archive, a printing museum, a functioning print studio, and an extensive library—all in one efficiently designed, multipurpose building.

Tipoteca is housed on the premises of the Canapificio Veneto, next to the Brentella canal. Built at the end of 19th century, the Canapificio was a hemp mill and today is a significant historical site, and provides an excellent example of the traditional importance of industry in this region of Italy. Tipoteca’s showrooms are in the former St. Teresa church, built in 1886, and in the adjacent workers premises.

Vingaards Officin is a Danish printing museum in the city of Viborg. It shows working printing machines like Monotype, Intertype linecasting, Ludlow, Typograph, Intertype photosetter, Heidelberg cylinder. The museum opens Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.