About the Museum
Museum hours are Wednesday through Saturday 10 am to 5 pm and by appointment. Please call ahead for group visits. Admission is $5 ($3 students and seniors; children under 6 free).
The museum is a non-profit organization, incorporated in 1978 as The Friends of The Museum of Printing, Inc., to save printing equipment and library materials associated with arcane technologies. The history of printing has changed dramatically during the last 100 years, moving away from letterpress printing to photographic and electronic technologies. The museum tells the stories of these changes using one of the world’s largest collections of printing hardware (see The Collection).
The ground floor of the 25,000 sq. ft. museum contains two 90-foot galleries, a large lobby, a library and access to the library’s archival stacks (4 floors). The Robert L. Richter Memorial Library is named after one of the two people who began the museum effort (see Library). The second floor contains a large meeting room, offices and additional future display space (see Current Exhibit).
Gallery One contains an elaborate timeline history of the manufacturing of letters. Visitors are walked through the foundry era, which reaches back 500 years. A guide explains the transition to mechanized hot-metal typesetting. The tour includes explanations of Linotype, Monotype and Ludlow linecasting machines. Along the tour route the next exhibit features a Monophoto and an Intertype Photosetter, machines which attempted to use linecasting technology to transition to phototypesetting, only to fail in competition with the electronically-driven phototypesetters. The display includes strike-on typesetters, machines designed to produce inexpensive type which could be married to the expanding offset printing market. The story line then drifts to phototypesetters, where Massachusetts hi-tech companies played a dominant role. The last chapter of this type story is digital. This story is told in a room paneled with bright digital prints output on a modern large format printer.
