The image above comes to us from The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum an amazing treasure trove of wooden type and letterpress goodies. If you have any intention of getting work done today – do not go to their site. The actual image is a print they recently pulled.. well, I’ll just let them tell it:
This is the first-ever printing of an 1893 plaque that Hamilton made for the Columbia Exposition in Chicago. It features 48 different wood fonts, measures 51″ x 22″ and boasts the smallest wood type ever made. The plaque is the only known copy that exists and needed to be printed without getting ink on it. After experimenting with various offsetting techniques we settled on shrinkable window film as a barrier and printed through it. It gives a bit of a ghostly effect but the posters are really handsome and we are able to preserve and share this treasure of typography.
Here’s a picture of the plaque on the press bed. It’s a pretty great project. The museum is built in the old Hamilton type factory and is “a fully functional workshop and educational venue. In addition to its massive collection of 19th, 20th and soon-to-be-added 21st Century wood type, the museum also illustrates antique printing technologies including the production of hot metal type, hand operated printing presses, tools of the craft and rare type specimen catalogs”.
The next time I’m in Two Rivers, Wisconsin I know where I’m going for my printing fix.
One can’t look at one online type museum without sizing up the competition, in this case.. the great photo of the wooden type (above) was taken from the spash page of Unicorn Graphics online Wood Type Museum. The site has a great collection of type and a fairly user-friendly interface. And if you get bored you can click on over to their Museum of Creative Calendar Design. With such a love of type and design I may need to keep them in mind for my next odd mass-produced printing project.
I have to thank the modern type foundry Hoefler &Frere-Jones for these great links.
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Hamilton, Unicorn et al. are the most sumptuous sites – I’ve got lost in them for days at a time! Thanks for the great blog. K
[...] museum in question is the Hamilton Wood Type Museum that was mentioned here not too long ago. The film uses the museum as a site of inquiry into the thriving midwestern [...]