Type Museum

Coordinates: 51°28′27″N 0°6′56″W / 51.47417°N 0.11556°W / 51.47417; -0.11556

The Type Museum is a unique and massive collection of artefacts representing the legacy of type founding in England, whose famous type foundries and composing systems supplied the world with type in all languages. The museum was founded in 1992 and is located in Oval, south London, England. It closed to the public in 2006 because of a failure to incorporate, lack of operating funds and financial security. It has since rebranded itself as The Type Archive the old website is defunct and the http://www.typearchive.org/ is the new version fronting the same charity.

Overview

The Type Museum is the final repository of many of the original forms, punches, matrices and patterns of some of the most famous and successful metal and wood type foundries in the world. It also holds a historic collection of presses. It is estimated that the collections include between five and eleven million artefacts.

The Museum's collection is unique in holding examples of successive generations of technology used for type design and manufacture, from hand foundry and machine composition, through wood type, to photography and film setting (which laid the foundation for today's digital typography).