In 1876, Thomas Edison filed the first US patent for autographic printing by means of a duplicating press with an electric pen for cutting stencils. A subsequent patent followed, and then Chicago inventor and businessman, Albert Blake Dick, took it to the next level. He merged his efforts with Edison’s, improved the stencils and licensed the patents. In 1887, the A. B. Dick Company released the Model “0” flatbed duplicator selling for $12 ($284 today). Dick named the machine the Edison Mimeograph and it was an immediate success. The company went on to become the world’s largest manufacturer of mimeograph equipment.

Mitchel Ahern, the director of operations at the Museum of Printing (left), and Peter Corriveau, the assistant director of operations at the museum, lift the press into the back of a truck for transport. Lane Turner/Globe Staff

Stored and forgotten in a cramped closet in a South End basement, a 200-year-old printing press — 600 pounds of iron, wood, and plenty of dust — lurched recently toward a new chapter in its long and mysterious life.

Hauled onto makeshift dollies at Franklin Cummings Tech, a two-year trade college, this throwback innovation from the early 19th century attracted a gaggle of admirers as it rolled toward a moving van parked on nearby, cobblestone alley.

The press, built by Adam Ramage of Philadelphia in about 1815, is among only two or three believed to remain in existence, according to Mitchel Ahern, operations director at the Museum of Printing in Haverhill.

As Ahern helped extract the machine, broad smiles and compliments from movers and school staff greeted the press as it slowly emerged from its hideaway.

“Very cool,” cooed Ahern, who said the press willreceive star treatment among the museum’s displays of printing’s centuries-long evolution.

“It’s really exciting to see a press like this pop up,” Ahern said. “In its day, this was printing technology. Our mission is to keep this kind of thing out of landfills.”

Its recent discovery at Franklin Cummings Tech, which is moving to Roxbury for the spring semester after 117 years in the South End, is a reminder of the school’s close association with Benjamin Franklin, the Boston-born printer and Founding Father whose generosity led directly to the college’s creation.

Bible Bound
International Juried Exhibition
May 1 – September 1, 2026

Reception + Award Ceremony
May 9, 2026, 2 – 4pm

The Bible has had a profound impact on humanity, literature, art, history, and culture for over 2,000 years. As one of the oldest and most influential texts, it has shaped civilizations, religious practices, and cultural expressions. From illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages to Johannes Gutenberg’s first printed Bible in 1455, the Bible has played a key role in the development of printing and bookmaking.

The Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Mass. invited artists to create miniature artists books inspired by the Bible, reinterpreting its meaning through form, materials, scale, and various binding techniques. The exhibition highlights the Bible’s enduring impact and is displayed alongside the new “Rare Bible Room,” which features over 100 rare Bibles and 30 Bible leaves.

Curator: Ania Gilmore
Jurors: Ania Gilmore and Frank Romano

Congratulations to all artists invited for the Bible Bound International Juried Exhibition!

List of artists & works →

And check out the Twitter feed!

From 1920 to 1960 the Linotype library dominated typeface use. There were fewer than 100 US Monotype services and only ATF and Ludlow had unique fonts, mostly for display. Then came Photon, Compugraphic, GSI, Wang, Varityper, Alphatype, Autologic, Triple-I, and many others. They all needed type libraries and stole freely from Linotype. There is no law against this.

Gudrun Zapf von Hesse’s titling font, created 70 years ago as stamps for lettering on leather book covers and spines, is released as a digital font on her hundredth birthday.

Read Ferdinand Ulrich’s article on a remarkable graphic artist >

Robert Bringhurst and Amelia Hugill-Fontanel at the Society of Printers 43rd Annual W.A. Dwiggins Lecture at the Boston Public Library.

Bringhurst is the noted type historian and poet who spoke on the life and work of type designer Hermann Zapf. Amelia made the trek from Rochester, NY where she is Associate Curator for the RIT Cary Collection.

Boston Globe correspondent James Sullivan paid us a visit. This is what he found.

Our preparations for this began with the arrival in February of an authentic replica of an English Common Press, courtesy of our friend Gary Gregory, proprietor of the Printing Office of Edes & Gill. The English Common Press is a wooden hand-press that was used for printing in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was the first press that came to America. It was the press that printed the pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers that energized the revolution and the press that printed the Declaration of Independence. The printing press helped create America and this kind of press is an extremely important part of our history.

This replica will be used to print copies of the Declaration of Independence for Museum of Printing visitors. It is only one of two operational wooden presses in New England. This is the same press that was in the lobby of our previous building in North Andover, Massa­chusetts. Most recently it has resided at Old North Church in Boston where it was seen by thousands of visitors over the years at the Printing Office of Edes & Gill.

The grant that we received from the Massa­chusetts Office of Tourism (MOTT) has allowed us to offer four free events to Museum visitors. The first of those has already taken place on March 15th. Entitled “Wood Type Use, History, & Identification” it was led by lecture/workshop led by James Grieshaber of Virgin Wood Type in Rochester, New York. Three more events will follow:

One of the foremost in the US was American Type Foundries (ATF), founded in 1892 when 23 independent type foundries consolidated. These foundries were brought together for several reasons, one being that the Linotype, which produced a line of type, was introduced a few years earlier and was cutting into the sales of hand set type. Another was that the type produced by the various foundries was not systematic — point sizes and baselines varied between companies.

I first met him in 1960. I was the mail boy at the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn, NY and was delivering the mail to his cubicle on the 8th floor. He was adapting Palatino for the Linofilm. One day I got up the nerve to ask “Mr Zapf, what do you do?” He replied, “I correct the errors of my youth.” For example, the lowercase y had a curved calligraphic descender. He straightened it out. Those who stole Palatino from the hot metal version had something different from those who stole it from the phototype­setting version.

It’s been an exciting year in type; one that saw many technical innovations, company mergers and restructuring, as well as some delightful new font releases which we will surely encounter in printed matter around the world soon.

But let’s start with the biggest loss for our industry in 1915: Georges Peignot, type founder in Paris and one of our greatest type designers — of Grasset, Auriol, or Cochin to name a few — died in battle, only 43 years old. Curious to see how long the foundry will be able to remain independent without its head :/ Another substantial loss was the death of Wilhelm Woellmer’s CEO Siegmund Borchardt. His son Fritz (34) suceeded him at the Berlin foundry.

As part of its Linotype Legacy initiative, the Museum of Printing is creating an international directory of people who repair Linotype and other hot-metal typesetting machines. If you offer such services, or if you know of someone who does, please submit contact information via this web form: linotype-professionals-signup-form.

We also ask that you share this information broadly through social media, using the hashtag #LinotypeRepair.

We believe that by gathering this information we will be able to achieve one of the key goals of the Linotype Legacy initiative, which is to make it easier to find those who can service and repair Linotype machines.

The Museum of Printing’s Linotype Legacy fundraising initiative was begun in December of 2019. The latest development in the Museum of Printing’s Linotype Legacy work is a series of 10 videos with master mechanic Dave Seat. These can be viewed on our YouTube page.

Haverhill, MA (July 5, 2021) – Nationally syndicated columnist Llewellyn King, the executive producer and host of the weekly PBS news and public affairs program White House Chronicle, visited the Museum of Printing recently and interviewed Museum of Printing President Frank Romano about printing technology and the history of the newspaper. Also on hand was the producer and co-host, journalist Linda Gasparello.

The episode, entitled “American Newspaper Printing from Hot Type to Computers,” began airing on July 2, 2021 and will be seen on many PBS stations. It can also be viewed on demand at https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/569972704.

T. J. Lyons collected Victorian wood and metal type from the 1820s to the 1880s. He amassed over 2,500 unique typefaces for his small print shop in Allston, Mass. Eventually the collection was housed at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, and will now reside at the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

The Lyons Collection joins the vast typographic and printing resources of the Museum of Printing.

“Tom Lyons spent two years in the AEF Airforce during World War I,” said his grandson Steve Lyons, “and he returned from France for a stint in an advertising agency, where he was inspired by a freelance designer, George Trenholm, who used Old Fashioned Ornamented Typography. T.J. moved to his own print shop in 1924. When the Great Depression struck, printers began dumping the old ornamented type, and TJ went all in to build his collection.”

This type was then in demand by ad agencies anxious for type that would stand out. What is old becomes new again.

Some of his type was made into film and digital fonts by VGC and Compugraphic in the 1960s and 1970s, but it all exists as individual pieces of wood and metal, to be set by hand, one letter at a time.

“This collection cries to be used,” said Museum of Printing president Frank Romano, “and the Museum will have workshops and student projects that use this type for design and print projects.”

A permanent wood type exhibit will show the beauty and uniqueness of these fonts, but, more importantly, we will see the harmony of type and ink and paper, as they come together to produce typographic art.

The American missionary movement of the 19th century began in Haverhill, Mass. Haverhill was also a center for Bible translations. Adoniram Judson, (1788–1850) American linguist and Baptist missionary in Myanmar (Burma) translated the Bible into Burmese with his wife Ann Hazeltine Judson.

To commemorate the Haverhill Bible connection, the Museum of Printing has consolidated its extensive Bible collection and reference material in one exhibit and resource room.

A replica of the Gutenberg Bible lets you leaf through the book that started it all. There are over thirty historic Bibles plus many other printed religious publications and artifacts. Leaves from Luther’s German translation are on display. It changed the world of religion forever.

The Museum has one leaf from every Bible printed in Colonial America, including the first Bible printed in America, the Eliot Bible of 1663 in the Algonquin Indian language.

• Event: Haverhill Cultural Organizations Plan Virtual Activities April 20 –23
• Where: Zoom (Materials pickup at Buttonwoods or Dustin-Duston Garrison House)
• When: April 20 – 23, 2021 (Registration closes April 11, 2021)
• Contact: Melissa Drake programs@buttonwoods.org
• Website: http://www.buttonwoods.org/HCT-Virtual-Camp.html

Our panel of judges was faced with a difficult task, but they managed to agree that the entry “The Gutenbird Press” deserves the top spot in our recent caption contest. The winner was submitted by Sara Odom (Sara Historia / @atruestorycomic on Twitter). Congratulations, Sara! You have won a membership to the Museum of Printing. We’ll be sending you our 2021 calendar plus the latest edition of our newsletter.

Our thanks everyone who submitted an entry. The full list of entries is shown below. Thanks also to C.B. at the Green Turtle Press who took the picture!

A great way to stay up to date on Learning Letterpress content is to like the Learning Letterpress Facebook page. See https://facebook.com/learningletterpress. If you are interested in hosting a Learning Letterpress workshop, please email Dori at hellow@sidetrackpress.com.

Every time you use Helvetica or Times New Roman or any other typeface, you are a part of typographic history. Type, which started with scribes and was advanced by Gutenberg, is now reflected in every e-mail and every printed document.

The Museum of Printing maintains one of the largest collections of typographic artifacts in the world. The centerpiece of this collection is the archive of more than 860,000 original drawings for every character in the Linotype typeface library.

Museums, like other parts of our society, have suffered during the pandemic. We are unable to open our doors to visitors and therefore have no revenues from entrance fees or gift shop purchases. The Museum of Printing greatly appreciates the support of the ECCF during these challenging times as well as their foresight in creating a grant program that helps institutions like ours.

Haverhill, MA (May 1, 2020) – The Boch Center, the producer of the annual ArtWeek festival which is presented by the Highland Street Foundation, announced that it is launching #ArtWeekAtHome on May 1st and The Museum of Printing is excited to feature The Alphabet Factory At Home. The reimagined format replaces the original statewide ArtWeek that would have featured almost 800 creative events in over 170 communities across Massachusetts, including many free events for families, children, residents, and visitors.

The Museum of Printing presents The Alphabet Factory At Home: “Print” your name with anything but paper and create your own typeface! From thumbtacks to daffodils, use what you have at home and shape it into your name. Take a pic and share it with Artweek and The Museum of Printing. May 1st – 10th, 2020 #ArtWeekAtHome @ArtWeekMa

The Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts is asking printers around the world to share the projects they are working on while sheltering at home. The promotion, under the hashtag #PrintinginPlace, is a way to connect and have fun during a difficult time.

There are lots of ways that folks can participate:

1. Track the hashtag #PrintinginPlace to see what others are up to
2. If you want to join in the fun, use the hashtag #PrintinginPlace on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to highlight what you are working on (like letterpress and silkscreen prints, linocuts, a woodcuts, or a potato prints).
3. Take a shot at replicating an Inland Printer cover* (or other historical printed document or advertisement) as demonstrated below by the Museum’s own Mindy Mitrano.

Dear Friend of the Museum,

Your help is needed to support something that is very near and dear to my heart. You may have heard that I started my career in the mailroom of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn, New York in 1959. At that time, Linotype machines were still central to the production of newspapers, books, and other printed matter. Did you know that over 200,000 linecasters of all makes were manufactured from 1886 to the 1970s? Less than 1,000 of those machines remain today and only a fraction of those are still operational. Few people truly understand the extent of the revolution that was made possible by the Linotype Company and its competitors. Inventor Thomas Edison called the Linotype “the 8th wonder of the world.”

Yet the historical impact of the Linotype is at risk of being forgotten or lost. Very few people still know how to operate a Linotype. Fewer still know how to service and repair Linotype machines to keep them running. Some Linotype parts are hard to find. Linotype matrices are in short supply. We must act now to save the Linotype for future generations.

This collection joins the over 9,000 typographic items in the Museum’s archives. It is one of the most compete collections of 20th century worldwide typographic development and promotion.

John Schappler worked as a type designer under R. Hunter Middleton at Ludlow Typograph, and also held type design positions with IBM, Compgraphic, Sun, and Itek. Schappler was a calligrapher who learned his craft from the renowned lettering teacher and historian Father Edward Catich. He saved almost everything typographic.

Penrose began in 1895 as “Process Work Yearbook—Penrose’s Annual.” Lund Humphries printed the publication in 1897 and was responsible for its content since 1906, until selling Penrose to Northwood Publications Limited, part of the Thompson Corporation, in 1974. It was edited by William Gamble from 1895 to 1933.

The Museum of Printing had just what was needed to depict the composing rooms of 1971.

• Tabletop presses
• Books
• Type & handy boxes
• Borders & ornaments
• Cuts, quoins, furniture, tools

How about the whole kit-and-caboodle? We can put together a printing kit for you — everything that you or a special someone needs to start printing.

Just back from the binders (thank you Superior Packaging!), the publication is titled The Inland Printer: A Selection of Historic Covers, with an introduction by Museum President and Professor Emeritus, Frank Romano. All covers are pictured in full color and arranged chronologically. The softcover book measures 5½″ × 8½″.

Featured are many important artists and designers who contributed to the magazine, including early creations by young American illustrator and artist William H. Bradley, whose work marked the beginnings of Art Nouveau in graphic design.

The Museum of Printing is sad to note the passing of Anna Hogan, esteemed wood engraver and friend, who died peacefully on December 17, 2017, just a few weeks after her 96th birthday. A local artist, Anna gained national recognition through the Wood Engravers’ Network and our museum.

Our art gallery showcases a permanent display of Anna’s work. Her talent and skill awe visitors. It was almost a decade ago when she walked through our front door with armloads of engravings, having generously decided to donate her life’s work to the Museum. We are honored to hold this important collection and showcase it for all to enjoy.

Anna’s art reflects her many interests. When she wasn’t teaching art at Stratford High School in Connecticut, she enjoyed traveling the New England countryside and the world, from Japan to Mexico. Every December, she created a new holiday card for family and friends. In the summer of 2013, she participated in the Wood Engravers’ Network weeklong Workshop at the Museum of Printing where she reconnected with old friends and made many new ones. In the autumn of 2013 WEN organizer, Jim Horton, wrote in Block & Burin “One of the best parts of the museum was an exhibition of Anna Hogan. Anna is a famed printmaker, now in her nineties, who lives in Andover. She actually attended the Workshop, called herself a student, and yet she could teach us all. As many WEN members know, her prints are precious jewels . . . as is she. A warm, sincere person and absolutely on top of everything.”

We commemorate Gutenberg’s achievement with an exclusive pop-up card produced for the Museum of Printing by acclaimed designer, Julie Brumlik. This beautiful 8″ × 8″ custom-made card is our gift to you with a donation of $50 or more.

This one-day workshop covers a broad range of materials and techniques for letterpress printing on fabric. Varieties and behaviors of inks will be discussed along with various impression techniques: the barren, the hammer, body-weight, roller press, sleigh press, hand press and others. Working in color and registration will also be reviewed. Students will print their own work on flour-sack dish towels (provided). Any participants who practice linoleum block cutting are urged to bring some of their designs for printing.

Instructor Mitchel Ahern has relief printed on fabric for forty years and exhibited (and performed) his print works at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Figment festivals, the Lowell Folk Festival and many area galleries and performance venues. He will bring many examples of his own letterpress on fabric work, including dishtowels, canvases, and both horizontal and vertical large-format scrolls.

The workshop has been filled.

Join us at a lecture by none other than David R. Godine, Paragon of Publishers, who is prepared to reveal tales of a misspent youth, dissolute middle age & curmudgeonly dotage and much more at The Museum of Printing. Please RSVP ASAP, as space is limited. April 21, 2018, 1:00–2:30pm.

Use Helvetica or Times Roman? How about Palatino or Optima? They began life as a drawing for every glyph in a font of Linotype hot metal type. Later they were converted to phototypesetting and then to digital type. They also formed the basis for other typesetting machines and fonts from competitors who “borrowed” the designs.

This precious archive has been in the possession of the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Mass. for over two decades. Researchers from all over the world have analyzed the large drawings for clues in the evolution of fonts by Dwiggins, Zapf, and many others.

The Museum has broken ground for an environmentally secure archive for this priceless colllection. Within the next two months, the collection will be transferred to air-tight containers from their original boxes into a state-of-the-art facility.

Gift certificates are now available for the Museum of Printing for use in the Museum Store, toward workshops or membership and as admission to paid events.

Purchases may be made at the Museum with cash, credit card or check, or via mail. To purchase by mail send a check to our business office at

Museum of Printing
POB 5580
Beverly, MA 01915

W. A. Dwiggins (1880–1956) spent the latter decades of his life designing printing types, making books, and creating puppets and plays for his private marionette theater. However, in an earlier period of about twenty-five years, he produced a substantial body of work for a long list of paper mills and merchants, most of which were located in the Northeast. These advertisements and sample books exhibited Dwiggins’s manifold skills as a calligrapher, illustrator, colorist, maker of patterns, and writer. He was not only one of the first writers to use the term “graphic design” — he was also a pioneer in drawing what we now call infographics. But there’s another important aspect of the work: Always a teacher at heart, WAD saw these pieces as a means of guiding printers and designers toward best practices in printing illustrations and using color in unexpected ways.

Bruce will present to us a broad selection of Dwiggins’s projects from this fertile quarter-century, drawing from the Museum of Printing’s own holdings, from the Boston Public Library, from his own private collection, and from the archives of S. D. Warren and Strathmore, McGill University, and Letterform Archive. PLEASE JOIN US ON OCTOBER 13th for a rollicking journey across this multi-colored landscape.

We cordially invite you to attend a lecture by John Kristensen of Firefly Press.

John, who calls himself “the world’s last D. B. Updike wannabe,” will speak about Merrymount Press and the Janson Type.

Admission is free.

Boston’s Merrymount Press was the foremost American scholarly printing office of the first half of the twentieth century, and its proprietor, Daniel Berkeley Updike, was a scholar and historian as well as an impeccable printer. The masterpiece of the Press was undoubtedly the magisterial authorized revision of The Book of Common Prayer of 1928, considered by many to be the greatest American typographic achievement of the century. Updike chose a seventeenth-century typeface, then attributed (mistakenly) to Anton Janson. The type was then newly available from a German type foundry, cast from original matrices, but Updike chose instead to duplicate — essentially pirate — the type for his Prayerbook. The acclaim that greeted the book’s publication led to a wider revival of the Janson type, which has ever since remained a highly regarded classical book type.

Valerie Lester’s biography on Bodoni is the first in English and has received rave reviews. Scholarly — but eminently readable — the book is itself an example of the beautiful printing and exceptional design for which Bodoni was celebrated. Ms. Lester is an independent scholar and translator and her presentations are highly regarded.

Our segment starts 5:16 minutes into the broadcast. >

Lou graduated MIT in 1942 and joined Polaroid to work on war-related engineering projects. Later his Polaroid career included development of Edwin Land’s iconic invention of instant photography. In 1954, he moved to Photon where he worked on early photocomposition systems, the first of many leading-edge printing-related projects that occupied the next forty years. It was during this time he first became interested in the challenges of typesetting non-Latin-based languages such as Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Hindi.

Join us on November 2nd to Celebrate Frank Romano’s Latest Work
Lectures at 11 a.m and 1 p.m.

HISTORY OF DESKTOP PUBLISHING
By Frank Romano (with Miranda Mitrano)
Published by Oak Knoll Press

DTP: the story of PC, ASCII, WYSIWYG, ATM, PDF, GUI and more. . .

Literally any day now, we expect delivery of Frank Romano’s new book, History of Desktop Publishing, a personal and encyclopedic story of how the personal computer, unique applications, and many colorful people changed the creative and print communities. He has documented the histories of hot metal and phototypesetting and continues the tale of document production in this book. This installment ends as the Internet becomes a primary focus.

To celebrate this momentous event, admission was free for all.

Type Sales were scheduled for September 24 and November 19, but our store has been greatly expanded and is open every Saturday, 10am to 3pm.

Here is a sampling of what’s coming to market. . . .

• Golding Pearl #3 1887 standing press, 7 × 11 with new rollers
• Complete Kingsley foil stamping machine with accessories
• Complete set of hand bookbinding tools (sewing frame, finishing press and more, all virtually new)
• Book (nipping) presses (2)
• Paper drying racks, new, wall mount (2)
• Tabletop presses (4)
• Wooden type cabinet with California type cases
• Metal type cabinets (3) with California type cases
• Furniture and reglet cabinets
• Southworth tabletop perforator
• Letterpress tools and supplies galore: strip border material, leading space material (1, 2, 6 pt.), quoins (Challenge wedge, Wickersham, High Speed)