Type Museum

The Type Museum stood in Stockwell, South London, for three decades. Its buildings once housed a veterinary medicine and quarantine station, even holding baby elephants. The founder chose an elephant as the museum’s symbol. It held over six million artefacts from English type foundries, including punches, matrices and patterns. The Stephenson Blake collection alone contained 2.5 million items. The Monotype collection covered the firm’s global output in almost all languages. The Robert DeLittle wood type manufactory preserved the last specialist English wood type patterns. The museum preserved the legacy of England’s type founding industry. Stephenson Blake acquired many famous foundries, including Caslon. The Monotype Corporation’s archive was bought with a National Heritage Memorial Fund grant. Monotype Hot-Metal Ltd. supplied matrices to hobbyists and firms worldwide. The museum trained apprentices in matrix manufacture until July 2022. A major exhibition on Berthold Wolpe drew around 1,000 visitors in 2017. Icelandic calligrapher Gunnlaugur SE Briem also featured in a later show. Visitors found historic presses and Monotype casting machinery in operation. The museum ran occasional open houses and printing workshops for schools. Volunteers maintained the equipment and produced matrices on demand. The Wolpe exhibition combined archive material with works from his family. The Briem exhibition displayed handwriting and calligraphic pieces. The site’s long history and collections made it a unique record of printing’s past.