Plans for The British Museum of Printing are being firmed up under the guidance of a ten-strong steering group.
The proposal is to create a virtual museum in the first instance, pulling together details of artefacts and historic equipment held in smaller collections around the country in a comprehensive website developed by specialists at Heritage Creative.
Currently the project has the support of the National Printing Heritage Committee at the Printing Historical Society, the Centre for Printing History and Culture in Birmingham, Winterbourne House and garden, Ironbridge Gorge Museums, the University of Sussex and Birmingham City University.
Rachel Stenner, director of the centre for early modern and medieval studies at Sussex University, says in a blog: “Currently, British printing heritage is at risk, with historical printing artefacts and archives neither documented nor preserved in a coordinated manner. The majority of museum holdings are in storage and inaccessible to the public. So a British Museum of Printing is long overdue. As a first step towards bringing the nation’s printing heritage together and making it publicly visible, I am working in a steering group with heritage professionals and print historians to create a virtual resource.
“Our current tasks are to engage an online audience for the museum and work with collection holders to design criteria for the inclusion of their materials.”
The ultimate aim is the creation of a physical museum to record the development of printing in Britain, from the days of Caxton to the modern era, recording the industrial advances made in the UK or by British inventors.
There are numerous collections of printing equipment across the country, most dating from the nineteenth century and the Columbian press. Larger assemblages of equipment are at the Type Archive and Science Museum, though not currently on view. The John Jarrold Museum has moved from Norwich to the National Trust property at Blickling Hall Estate near Aylsham, where it is the basis of the Norwich Printing Museum, with hand composition, letterpress print and bookbinding skills demonstrated.
