Last week I had a job interview for a web editor position (and yes, I got the job!). They were pretty interested in the fact that I’ve worked as a writer in the past, and asked for some examples from my time in the advertising industry. Of course, I threw my advertising folio away several house moves ago, so went through my computer and found some other pieces to send through.
I’d forgotten about the writing I’d done for Macabre Melbourne… reading back through, I think I did a pretty good job, and I’m going to repost some of the pieces here. First up, the Melbourne Museum of Printing.
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I made my first linocut print in 1991. I made my second linocut print in 1996. I’ve since completed an entire undergraduate degree in printmaking, right here in Melbourne. I’ve been taught by printmakers, my friends are printmakers and I belong to online printmaking communities. So of course I’d know all about the Melbourne Museum of Printing, right? Right? Wrong.
A few months ago, when pondering what I might do with my millions in imaginary lottery winnings, I got a hankering to start collecting lead type. As you do. And I realised that while letterpress is a booming medium overseas, there didn’t seem to be the same level of machinery and interest in printmaking circles here. So I hit The Google and proceeded to mop up a pool of my own drool when I discovered a foundry almost in my own backyard.
The Melbourne Museum of Printing was founded as the Australian Type Company around 1977 at 91 Moreland St in Footscray. It was established as a comprehensive collection of printing equipment and artefacts including presses, typesetting equipment and fonts. Eventually, as similar businesses disappeared, the museum became the only remaining type foundry in Australia. Instead of following suit and closing down in the 90s, proprietor Michael Isaachsen turned the collection into a non-profit working museum.
In 1998, the museum was forced to move to a smaller premises in Footscray, and many of the items were dispersed to various warehouses across Melbourne. Storage and funding has been a constant issue, with the threat of destruction constantly hanging over the collection.
Although I studied printmaking at university, my course focussed less on type and letterpress and more on the other traditional print mediums — etching, linocut, lithography, screenprinting and so on. We had a case or two of Bodoni lead type and a few galleys lying around, but not much else, and I get the impression that things are much the same in the two other university-based printmaking courses here in Melbourne.
Thankfully for us type-nerds, the workshop at 36 Moreland St is available for open access to artists and designers, with the goal to move the museum to a larger facility and resurrect a program of classes in typesetting, design and book making. The museum is in a bind in terms of receiving any sort of government funding without having these programs in place, while being unable to start classes without funding.
It would be heartbreaking to see these wonderful, traditional methods of printmaking disappear here, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so, as evidenced by the huge crowd that turned out to the open day fundraiser held by the museum this past weekend. Melbourne locals The Primitive Calculators played a (very, very loud, very, very fun) gig outside while hordes of people crammed themselves into the little building to look at artefacts and watch demonstrations of the linotype press and bookbinding facilities.
So if you have a spare eight grand, send it the way of the Melbourne Museum of Printing. Hell, even $200 for one of the editioned prints on sale would go a long way. If you can’t quite make it all the way to Footscray, head on over to the MMOP website to find out more. They’re definitely a type I’d like to see stick around.
