The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers Wisconsin is celebrating their 10th anniversary this year. The museum is in an old factory, and they’ve decorated it with large type and the awning is a giant drawer pull, like the ones on type cases. Nick Sherman has a great pool of photos on Flickr. And there’s a nice interview by Steven Heller about the museum and the history of wood type here (and a few more photos, including a gorgeous hand-cut wooden Q).
The photostream is fabulous!
While I think the museum’s achievement—a vast collection, well preserved and thoughtfully displayed—is wonderful, I wish its web site were more visual and informative. Would a virtual exhibition defeat the purpose of a physical museum, I wonder? Maybe a changing online display would be a workable compromise.
A beautiful example of an online wood type display is The Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection based on Kelly’s out-of-print book, American Wood Type: 1828-1900, and created by the University of Texas. (Much of Kelly’s collection was cut by Hamilton.) There’s a nice article about Kelly and his magnum opus on the Hoefler & Frere-Jones web site.