The Tiny Type Museum

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might have noticed that I'm a bit of a typography geek. That's a family influence; my father worked at the Sault Daily Star, working his way up from a errand boy to running the composing room. During his career, he went from setting the newspaper in hot lead using Linotype machines to computerized typesetting. By the time he retired, I was able to show him a fanzine that I produced at home using Ventura Publisher. 

If you're into typography, you probably are going to want the Tiny Type Museum. 

The Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule is a celebration of type and printing, and an effort at preserving history for future generations to re-discover. Each custom, handmade wood museum case holds a couple dozen genuine artifacts from the past, including a paper mold for casting newspaper ads in metal, individual pieces of wood and metal type, a phototype “font,” and a Linotype “slug” (set with your own message), along with original commissioned art and a letterpress-printed book and a few replicas of items found in printing shops.

Ingredients for the museum will be sourced from active letterpress printers, type foundries, artists, and nooks and crannies where people stashed the past in the hopes of someone showing interest in preserving it. I’ll pull all of this together into a unique collection that’s impossible to find outside of a full-scale printing history museum and put it into your hands.

The museum comes with a letterpress-printed book in which I trace the nearly six centuries of development of type and printing since Gutenberg printed his Bible. This book will be the “docent” for the museum, providing insight into the stages in technological and artistic development that took place, and explaining the importance and nature of the artifacts. It will also slip neatly into a slot in the top of the museum case. (The book is available as a separate reward.)

The museum lays out the history of printing in miniature, and serves as an object of study and conversation, a teaching tool, and a time machine—offering a small, but deep, glimpse into the past to those who discover it in years to come.

I wish I could afford this, but I don't have a grand (US) to splurge on it. There are some cheaper price points, one of them being getting a PDF of the book for $10, which I might go for. It would probably be worth it just so I can explain to my kids and grandkids what my dad did.