Focus on printing museums

In 2023 the Tipoteca Italiana was the first European printing museum to be honoured by the American Printing History Association with its prestigious Institutional Award .

The Penrith Museum of Printing, located in the large western Sydney suburb of Penrith, the gateway to the Blue Mountains, is probably today the best, best-run and best-known of Australia’s many printing museums. Threatened by a projected new sports facility, is it in danger of going the same way (i.e. into oblivion) as the Melbourne Museum of Printing?

When Klaus Urbons first opened his photocopier museum as a private initiative the idea of collecting such everyday material must have seemed pretty outrageous to some. Today it has become an absolute necessity.

The town Rendsburg may be a bit remote for anyone doing the Grand Tour of Europe but it is well worth the detour - for its excellent printing museum as well as for the town itself and no less for the train ride through the countryside. One of the best printing museums and superior to some which are far better known.

Reflections on the notion of a 'national printing museum' and the chances of such a thing ever coming into being. The context is that of Australia, but the questions that Jürgen Wegner raises are universal.

A study in survivals (as D. B.Updike once put it): the collection put together in the 1980s by the staff of the Druckerei Fortschritt (Progress Printery) with the aim of establishing a printing museum to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Karl Marx is now housed in the local museum of the city of Erfurt. It's well worth visiting.

Like many local history museums, the Stadtmuseum of Mosbach in Germany devotes an interesting section of its permanent display to the black art, 'from Gutenberg to newspaper printing'.

The story of the Museum of printing which was founded in 1978 by a group of New England printers and publishers anxious to save the Boston Globe's hot metal typesetting and letterpress printing equipment. It was 18 years however before it opened its first exhibition in North Andover. In 2016 it was finally able to showcase its superb collections in purpose-built premises in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

Established by the Alpha Bank, Greece's largest privately-owned banking group, the Banknote Museum is devoted to the history of paper money with a special emphasis on the Ionian Bank between 1839 and 1920, before it lost its privilege to issue paper money.