The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum was founded in 1999 and is located in Two Rivers,

Wisconsin Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...

, United States. The museum is run by the Two Rivers Historical Society. It is dedicated to the preservation, study, production and printing of

wood type 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 l ...

used in

letterpress printing Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing. Using a printing press, the process allows many copies to be produced by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against sheets or a continuous roll of paper. A worker com ...

. The museum is located in a factory building of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company founded in 1880 by J.E. Hamilton. The museum has a collection of over 1.5 million pieces in more than 1,000 styles of wood type. 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.

Hamilton Manufacturing Co.

The Hamilton Manufacturing Company was started by James Edward Hamilton and began producing type in 1880. 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. Hamilton is now known as Hamilton Scientific, after the sale by previous company owner

Thermo Fisher Scientific Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is an American supplier of scientific instrumentation, reagents and consumables, and software services. Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, Thermo Fisher was formed through the merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Sc ...

to OpenGate Capital, LLC on October 24, 2012.

Move from Hamilton Factory

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. 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. After almost one year of being closed, the museum opened the doors at its new location on November 13, 2013. The original historic/manufacturing building was demolished in 2015.

Target's Vintage Varsity Collection

U.S. retailer

Target Corporation Target Corporation ( doing business as Target and stylized in all lowercase since 2018) is an American big box department store chain headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is the seventh largest retailer in the United States, and a com ...

used pieces from the museum's collection for their 2011 Fall fashion line. 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.

''Typeface'' documentary

The museum was the subject of the 2009

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

''Typeface''.

References

External links