This holiday season, there will no longer be “room at the inn” for the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wis. Recently, the owners of the historic Hamilton building at 1619 Jefferson St. told the museum’s proprietors that the building will close and must be vacated as early as February.
Hamilton Wood Type opened for business in 1880 in that location. Today, it is the only museum dedicated to the preservation, production and printing of wood type. The institution boasts 1.5 million pieces of wood type, more than 1,000 styles and sizes of patterns, as well as all the equipment necessary to print with it. As such, moving this enormous collection to another space will require at least $250,000 and many, many volunteers.
“We are humbly but aggressively asking for cash donations,” artistic director Bill Moran admitted in a press statement.
At the time of this writing, more than $65,000 had been pledged via its website.
