Established in 1992, the Type Museum’s first ten years saw the creation of a collection of international importance.
Since 1995 the collection has been housed in Stockwell, in a range of industrial buildings built between 1895 and 1905 as a veterinary hospital.
Our mission is to collect, preserve and interpret the historic artefacts associated with the spread of the printed word and image, throughout the world, and to place them in the context of modern technology and design and of the far longer history of mankind’s use of graphic symbols.
Its first goal has been to preserve the means of making type. Over the past twelve years, The Type Museum has been able, with the timely and imaginative support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, to acquire key collections documenting the principal chapters in the history of type in Britain
• traditional typefounding, from Stephenson Blake and Co., Sheffield
• woodletter type, from Robert DeLittle, York
• mechanical typecasting (‘hot metal’), from the Monotype Corporation
These collections include materials dating from the sixteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Smaller collections include the working papers of Walter Tracy RDI.
Each major acquisition has brought with it substantial quantities of archival material, including highly important collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century type specimen books and, in the case of Monotype, the complete business records of a global enterprise. Taken together, these materials form the nucleus of a typographic study centre where documents can be studied alongside the artefacts and processes to which they refer.
The future
The Museum has received planning grants from the Getty Grant programme and the Department of Culture (through the National Museum of Science and Industry). The development project, designed by Marks Barfield Architects in association with Jasper Jacob Associates, will create a vibrant museum setting with permanent and temporary exhibition galleries, a range of visitor facilities, and collections storage to the highest international standards.
