Greetings again! It’s about that time of year where the greater American public gets thankful about the things in their lives. Lately I’ve become thankful for the Museum of Printing, a collection celebrating the engineering and design of printed materials and their manufacture.
The museum sits in an unassuming building in Haverhill, Massachusetts. It’s only open on Saturdays, which gives one a narrow window to take everything in. On that particular day, my friend and I literally walked into a tour (the museum’s exhibits run right up to the entrance) and were warmly greeted by not one, but two guides. We were given a quick rundown of the Museum’s Bible Room, which — and there are no points for guessing correctly — contain scores of Bibles from throughout history, including replicas of the Gutenberg Bible. There was enough in this one room alone to spend an hour examining all the type designs and book constructions, as well as leafing through some of the larger Bibles. There was also a copy of the world’s smallest Bible, but according to the Museum, you’d need an electron microscope to read it.
Catching up with the rest of the tour, there were a number of attractions that would pull in any graphic designer: exhibitions from local artists and designers; replicas and restorations of historical letterpresses; rare books of vintage typefaces; and prints from local newspapers. You’d think that a small space wouldn’t contain enough to be very engaging, but the space was dense with information.
Next up was the Museum’s collection of printing equipment. This room (which I only call a single room because it lacked significant partitions) held a variety of letterpresses, typewriters, Linotype machines, and offset printers. Best of all was the live demo of the Linotype machine, which itself has to be one of the most satisfying pieces of print engineering to engage the senses. Like a steam locomotive, the Linotype runs hot, emanating a noticeable amount of heat as it melts an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony into lines of metal type on the fly. There’s a metallic odor of the hot metal, mechanical arms raising and lowering to adjust parts on the fly, and the click-clack of the keyboard is followed by the cascading jingle of the templates for each glyph being automatically returned to their sorting trays.
The final room housed the Museum’s libraries, the most stunning of which was the Romano Library. Thousands of books about printing are housed here, and we even ran into Frank Romano himself, the curator and fellow New Yorker who not only amassed the collection, but worked on International Paper’s (now Sylvamo) Pocket Pal series of reference books for three decades. (I love my Pocket Pal; it’s a dense little book that contains everything a print designer needs to know, and plenty more that they probably don’t.)
That particular Saturday was also significant because it was the day of one of the Museum’s garage sales. Along with books — which I bought — there were tabletop letterpresses, inks, paper, flat files, dies, cases of type (upper and lower, of course) and various odd tools and parts for them all. But there was a specific reason I had been waiting months for this day: to see if I could find a book press for my bookbinding hobby.
And find one I did! Well, actually there were at least three there, but most of them were six feet tall and I’m not doing anything larger than letter size. Sitting on a flat file, however, was a brilliant little tabletop book press, which was absolutely perfect for my needs. And it only weighs 63 pounds! Score!
All in all, I’m making a solid recommendation for the Museum of Printing to anyone even slightly interested in the process. If you can get there during one of their sales, it’s the perfect opportunity to grab some unique and practical items.
In other news, I’d like to announce that I’m working on setting of the public domain book The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. As there is less illustration in this title, I’m hoping to have it ready sometime in Q1 2026. I’m also hoping to use my new press to create a couple of handbound volumes, which will be available in my shop.
Speaking of which, the shop has been open with copies of Four Worlds, Valentine’s Day, and Kelly Ranger; take a look, why don’t you?