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Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione (tipo type, teca case) is a remarkable museum of type and typography, immaculately conceived and designed as a working museum for the presentation of printing and typographical history. Tipoteca is situated in Cornuda, in the Treviso province in the northeastern region of Italy.

When I stepped foot in the Museum, I felt like I had died and gone to book printer’s heaven. It’s a huge manufacturing warehouse that’s been transformed into a modern sleek workshop with different letterpresses of various sizes, and all the accompanying bookmaking equipment and paraphernalia: typecasting machines, book presses, binding equipment, a working Monotype room with a good collection of matrices, paper trimmers, Linotype machines, endless rows of type cabinets containing an amazing variety of wood and metal type, including the largest selection of Italian modernist wood display typefaces anywhere. (This was the kind of large wooden hand-cut type that would have been used to create Futurist and Bauhaus posters and manifestos at the beginning of the last century, and it’s in perfect condition.)


Another treat was seeing the fascinating collection of books and printing artifacts that told the history of printing, type design, and book design in Italy. It takes your breath away to see it all.

The Foundation, launched in 1995 by the Antiga brothers who own and run a modern printing company (Grafiche Antiga), was created with the aim of safeguarding historic printing machinery and promoting the value of printing and of mobile printing types. The Tipoteca opened the Type and Printing Museum to the public in November 2002.

The Museum occupies roughly 23,000 sq feet and houses over 150 printing machines and hundreds of sets of printing types, the public area and a beautiful library (with valuable old books by Aldus Manutius and other). The Museum is housed in a former Canapificio Veneto or hemp mill.

The Museum employs research staff, personnel involved in the purchase of exhibits and technicians in charge of repairing and maintaining the machinery and equipment in its original working order. 

In the history of mankind the invention of printing and movable types led to an immense change in the dissemination of culture and knowledge. Books which had been available in small numbers in manuscript form could now be printed and distributed by the hundreds and thousands of copies. The invention of the movable types is therefore a symbol of the revolution that has accompanied man from the Renaissance to the present day. The handpress improved gradually finally becoming the fast, complex printing machines of today.

Typesetting too has improved with the new technology going from Monotype to Linotype, which has greatly helped to increase the production of printed material. In the 1980s new technology led to the spread of electronic typesetting at a rate that was unprecedented in production technology. The lead and wood movable types came to the end of a brilliant career that had lasted over five hundred years, and left a clear field to the digital age.

Silvio Antiga, president of the Foundation, has been a passionate witness of this evolution in printing and in the crafts and skills that are part of it. The transition has been cause of growing concern and he felt that without prompt action those machines and printing types which had dominated culture and progress for so long would disappear forever under the sledge hammer or at best, recycled in a smelting cauldron.

Mr. Antiga began to collect the printing types and the equipment that were gradually being substituted in his printshop and later began to purchase whatever other printers were discarding. This action soon found supporters in his own brothers, who share the responsibility of managing the Grafiche Antiga printing firm and who were determined to give a solid buttress to his efforts.

Today the museum is an active entity whose importance has been widely recognized and which is visited not only by students but also by an ever-growing number of experts and tourists. All the machines are functioning and workshops and demonstrations are carried out in the Museum while collection and restoration of other items continue undeterred.

One of the things that shines through is a high a regard for the printers themselves, as well as for the tools of their trade. The staff is friendly, helpful, and enthusiastic, and the curator of the Museum, Sandro Berra, is a charming guide who also speaks excellent English. Sandro has a suspicion of much contemporary “cutting-edge” artists’ book/sculpture fabrications, and instead prefers books with clear, legible, classically based typographic composition. He prefers sitting down and getting lost in the writing of a well-printed book, to participating in the materials fetishism of most avant-garde book arts monstrosities.

The place is a must for anyone interested in type, printing and its past. If you're visiting the Venice area, take a day trip to a small town of Cornuda, in the foothills of the Italian Alps, where you'll find Tipoteca to be a very pleasant experience. Click here to view Tipoteca's website

SVA Masters Workshop, Italy Part 1

In Venice, classes were held at the beautiful Fondazione Claudio Buziol (www.fondazioneclaudiobuziol.org), which at one point was supposedly home of Napoleon Bonaparte. Instructor Louise Fili lead us through daily fun mini-excursions through Venice, always making a stop to recap the day’s lecture over gelato. Our guest lecturers included an introduction to Venice by Giorgio Camuffo, designer and principle of Studio Camuffo (www.studiocamuffo.it) and an overview of 600 years of the history of Italian graphic design in a 45 minute keynote presentation by Carlo Branzaglia, a professor of design theory and criticism at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna.

 


And although we missed the highly anticipated Venice Biennale (the grandest stops on the art-world grand tour, a Miss America pageant for art), the Venice portion of the program was filled with grand art-stops of its own like a trip to Fabrica (www.fabrica.it), a day at the Rialto market with Louise Fili, an incredible trip to Tipoteca (www.tipoteca.it), a superb museum of type and printing, and an unforgettable visit to Gianni Basso, Venice’s oldest letterpress shop (who doesn't own a cell phone, let alone a website). Each day was so packed, and so different, it left little room to develop a daily routine, but thanks to Louise, I did take habit to constantly photographing store signs, typography and being on a constant lookout for orange and melon fruit wrappers.

The final presentation in Venice felt much too similar to a year that I thought I just finished. Am I back in class? I thought this was vacation. I'm binding books on vacation! Nevertheless, about 7 of us didn’t sleep the night before the final presentations, plugging away, printing and binding our books with less than sufficient supplies (scissors and glue sticks anyone?) In the end, everyone’s presentation went off without a hitch and the hard part was over, but sadly, so was half of the trip.