Established | 1999 |
---|---|
Location | Two Rivers, WI |
Type | Historical and Art |
Visitors | 5,000 per year |
Founder | Two Rivers Historical Society |
Director | Peter Crabb |
Public transit access | Maritime Metro Transit |
Website | www.woodtype.org |
The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum was founded in 1999 and is located in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, United States. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] The museum is run by the Two Rivers Historical Society. It is dedicated to the preservation, study, production and printing of wood type used in letterpress printing. The museum is located in a factory building of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company founded in 1880 by J.E. Hamilton. [6] The museum has a collection of over 1.5 million pieces in more than 1,000 styles of wood type. [7] Also included are presses and vintage prints. The museum holds many workshops and conferences throughout the year and regularly welcomes groups of students from universities from across the United States.
The Hamilton Manufacturing Company was started by James Edward Hamilton and began producing type in 1880. [8] Lyman Nash, editor of the Two Rivers Chronicle , asked Hamilton to make letters because he was short on time to order them from Chicago. Hamilton's letters printed so well that he began to take orders from other nearby newspapers. [8]
Hamilton is now known as Hamilton Scientific, after the sale by previous company owner Thermo Fisher Scientific to OpenGate Capital, LLC on October 24, 2012. [6]
In the Fall of 2012 the museum was informed by the property owners that it would need to move from its location inside of the Hamilton Manufacturing Corporation and have the space vacated by early 2013. The museum, lacking funds and manpower, immediately began a campaign for donations and volunteers to help move the museum and the museum's collection. [9]
The new location of the museum is in a building formerly owned by the Formrite Company in Two Rivers. The new building provides twice as much space as the original location. [10]
After almost one year of being closed, the museum opened the doors at its new location on November 13, 2013. [11]
The original historic/manufacturing building was demolished in 2015. [12]
U.S. retailer Target Corporation used pieces from the museum's collection for their 2011 Fall fashion line. [13] The collection was called "Vintage Varsity" and used the tag line "Cool Never Fades". The museum itself was one of three locations used for photo shoots for the line's print advertising campaign. [14]
The museum was the subject of the 2009 documentary film Typeface.
Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The earliest known form of printing as applied to paper was woodblock printing, which appeared in China before 220 AD for cloth printing. However, it would not be applied to paper until the seventh century. Later developments in printing technology include the movable type invented by Bi Sheng around 1040 AD and the printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. The technology of printing played a key role in the development of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
Two Rivers is a city in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 11,712 at the 2010 census. It is the birthplace of the ice cream sundae. The city's advertising slogan is "Catch our friendly waves" as it is located along Lake Michigan.
Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing for producing many copies by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against individual sheets of paper or a continuous roll of paper. A worker composes and locks movable type into the "bed" or "chase" of a press, inks it, and presses paper against it to transfer the ink from the type, which creates an impression on the paper.
A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype, for letterpress printers. Today's digital type foundries accumulate and distribute typefaces created by type designers, who may either be freelancers operating their own independent foundry, or employed by a foundry. Type foundries may also provide custom type design services.
Jonathan Hoefler is an American type designer. Hoefler founded the Hoefler Type Foundry in 1989, a type foundry in New York.
A wayzgoose was at one time an entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen each year on or about St Bartholomew's Day. It marked the traditional end of summer and the start of the season of working by candlelight. Later, the word came to refer to an annual outing and dinner for the staff of a printing works or the printers on a newspaper.
Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted. Oblique and italic type are technical terms to distinguish between the two ways of creating slanted font styles; oblique designs may be labelled italic by companies selling fonts or by computer programs. Oblique designs may also be called slanted or sloped roman styles. Oblique fonts, as supplied by a font designer, may be simply slanted, but this is often not the case: many have slight corrections made to them to give curves more consistent widths, so they retain the proportions of counters and the thick-and-thin quality of strokes from the regular design.
In typography, a slab serif typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular (Rockwell), or rounded (Courier). Slab serifs were introduced in the early nineteenth century.
P22 Type Foundry is a digital type foundry and letterpress printing studio based in Rochester, New York. The company was created in 1994 in Buffalo, New York by co-founders Richard Kegler and Carima El-Behairy. The company is best known for its type designs, which have appeared in films and on commercial products. The P22 Type Foundry retail font collection specializes in historical letterforms inspired by art, history, and science that otherwise have never been available previously in digital form. P22 works with museums and foundations to ensure the development of accurate historical typefaces, and with private clients to create custom bespoke fonts.
Clarendon is the name of a slab serif typeface that was released in 1845 by Thorowgood and Co. of London, a letter foundry often known as the Fann Street Foundry. The original Clarendon design is credited to Robert Besley, a partner in the foundry, and was originally engraved by punchcutter Benjamin Fox, who may also have contributed to its design. Many copies, adaptations and revivals have been released, becoming almost an entire genre of type design.
The Type Archive was a collection of artefacts representing the legacy of type founding in England, whose famous type foundries and composing systems supplied the world with type in over 300 languages. The Archive was founded in 1992 by Susan Shaw in Stockwell, South London. The Archive announced in mid-2022 that it would relinquish its building and return portions of its collections to other institutions.
The Colt Armory is a historic factory complex for the manufacture of firearms, created by Samuel Colt. It is located in Hartford, Connecticut along the Connecticut River, and as of 2008 is part of the Coltsville Historic District, named a National Historic Landmark District. It is slated to become part of Coltsville National Historical Park, now undergoing planning by the National Park Service.
The Grabhorn Institute is a nonprofit organization formed in October 2000 for the purpose of preserving and continuing the operation of one of the last integrated facilities for typefounding, letterpress printing, and bookbinding in the fine press tradition, as a living museum and educational and cultural center. It is named in honor of the brothers Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, who established the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco in 1920. The press was "one of the foremost producers of finely printed books in twentieth-century America." The Grabhorn Press Building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in San Francisco, California.
Stratasys, Ltd. is an American-Israeli manufacturer of 3D printers, software, and materials for polymer additive manufacturing as well as 3D-printed parts on-demand. The company is incorporated in Israel. Engineers use Stratasys systems to model complex geometries in a wide range of polymer materials, including: ABS, polyphenylsulfone (PPSF), polycarbonate (PC) and polyetherimide and Nylon 12.
William Hamilton Page (1829–1909) was a type designer and owner of William Page & Company, a leading manufacturer of wood type for letterpress printing.
J. E. Hamilton was an American industrialist who was the founder of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company in Two Rivers, Wisconsin which was the largest manufacturer of wood type in the United States.
The Original Heidelberg Platen Press was a letterpress printing press manufactured by the Heidelberger Druckmaschinen company in Germany. It was often referred to as the Heidelberg Windmill, after the shape and movement of its paper feed system. When introduced, it was also called the "Super Heidelberg" or the "Super Speed".
In letterpress printing, wood type is movable type made out of wood. First used in China for printing body text, wood type became popular during the nineteenth century for making large display typefaces for printing posters, because it was lighter and cheaper than large sizes of metal type.