This week I dragged my husband and son out of our holiday hibernation and up to the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.
What a cool place!
The museum is located in an age-old manufacturing plant used by the Hamilton Manufacturing Company, now known as Thermo Scientific. The building is as interesting as the wood type.
Wooden letters are everywhere! The museum has 1.5 million pieces of wood type in more than 1,000 styles and sizes. It also has an amazing collection of advertising cuts from the 1930s through the 1970s.
Back in the day, type cutters used this pantograph router to cut new letters while tracing an old letter. Hamilton manufactured wood type until the late 1980s.
Hamilton made the drawer pulls too. Aren’t they a wonderful contrast to the modern label-maker strips?
Ink and supplies from the old days.
The museum’s 40,000 square feet is packed with antique machinery — presses, sanders and so much more. They’re beautiful.
Lithograph printing: An era that followed letterpress.
Hamilton offers letterpress seminars and opportunities to use its equipment. I’m so planning to sign up for a class!
Artists customarily leave a sample of their work so the museum walls are truly a gallery. Aren’t they fun?
Wood Type: I think they’re so beautiful! Their use in letterpress is such an important part of our printing history, and, interestingly, it’s an art form being revitalized today.
Thanks Hamilton Wood Type & Museum for making this happen!