Type museum on starting block

The National Type Museum is this week a step closer to a full opening, following a 495 000 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund enabling it to buy a further collection of letter punches and type matrices.

The museum, based in a former horse hospital in south London, now requires funds to convert its premises into a working educational museum. It aims to provide training for the next generation of typographers, publishers, printers and engineers. Currently open only to pre-booked groups, the museum plans to be fully functional and open to the public within two years. Exhibition designers are yet to be appointed.

The latest grant has been made to enable the museum to buy the Stephenson Blake Collection of type artifacts, currently based in Sheffield. Following a conservation and cataloguing programme by Oxford University Press, the collection will join the Monotype Collection and the Robert Delittle Collection of wood letter patterns at the Type Museum.

They will form what Anthea Case, director of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, describes as “one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of artifacts relating to the manufacture of type and the heritage of the printed word”.