Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum

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Where might you expect to find the world’s largest collection of wood type? New York makes sense. Somewhere in Germany. But no, it’s in the small town of Two Rivers, WI at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. Having studied typography and printed hand-made books on a letterpress in my college years, I’ve long been curious about the museum. I’ve passed by it numerous times driving to and from vacations in Door County. Until now, though, I’d never stopped in.

Coincidentally, my curiosity had been peaked on a recent trip to Detroit, of all places. There I happened upon a small working letterpress print shop that had a lovely decorated alphabet broadside (aka hand-printed art poster with text) for sale, which I purchased. It had been printed (as you can see) at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, WI. So, when I went to Door County recently I just had to finally stop there.

Platen printing press

There were maybe a dozen cars lined up against the front of the building, which fronts onto Hwy 42 right on the shore of Lake Michigan. Inside it was quiet, though. The staff was warm and welcoming. “Thank you for stopping,” was a refrain I heard several times with great sincerity. The museum is set up to be self-guided, presumably because it is a working museum and with infrequent visitors the staff has other work to do.

Linotype printer

But the young woman who took my $5 admission fee also graciously and unhurriedly led me through and introduced me to the collection. I asked why the museum is in Two Rivers. The collection originated in what had been the Hamilton Wood Type manufacturing and printing company located there.

Carriage saw and half-round timber to be cut into type

Although I was left to explore the place on my own, the occasional passing staff members were invariably friendly and asked if I had any questions. In addition to innumerable glass-fronted cases of wood type itself, there were displays showing the process of manufacturing wood type, including the machinery required, as well as a variety of printing presses.

For the uninitiated, wood type, along with more common metal type, is individual letterforms made out of wood (or metal) that are used in a printing press made for the purpose. Setting type involves placing each letter in sequence, along with punctuation and spacing —and it’s done backwards! It is a laborious endeavor that once was necessary in order to print any kind of text.

The museum has an entire wall that is a veritable relief sculpture composed of wood type samples of various, mostly enormous, sizes. A small portion of it is all captured in the photo above.

Posted casually on several walls throughout the building are displays of broadsides, artistic prints and posters.

In one corner of the huge building I found a group of students busily concentrating on printing projects. As was emphasized to me several times, this is a working museum. Part of that work is to offer classes and workshops. This group was from the Illinois Institute of Art.

Stephanie Carpenter, Assistant Director of the museum (above, left), paused her mentoring of them to explain to me what they were working on, printing sample alphabets from amongst the vast collection of type available from a wall of type trays.

There is also a more traditional gallery that displays rotating exhibitions of framed work. The current exhibit is from the Silver Buckle Press, which was recently acquired by the Hamilton Museum in an agreement with the University of Wisconsin libraries, its former owner. Silver Buckle Press also was a historical collection of printing equipment and printed materials operated as a working museum by the U. W. libraries in Madison, WI.

The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum is open Tuesday - Saturday, 10 - 5 pm and Sunday 1 - 5 pm in the summer.  Winter hours and more info on their website. I can testify that they will be happy to receive you if you stop to visit.

Buns, Bugs, Nubbins and “What they thought” in Normal, IL

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“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” William Shakespeare

That famous quote from Hamlet is apropos to this review of art for at least two reasons. First, it was in fact to see a performance of Hamlet that I found myself in Bloomington/Normal, Illinois this past weekend. There is an annual summer Shakespeare festival (going on 40 years, they said) and several members of the Milwaukee Rep were acting in their performance of Hamlet, including the unconventional choice of a female title character played by Deborah Staples.

The performance was wonderful and wickedly funny. Staples brought to Hamlet’s character a kind of youthful, even adolescent energy and fragility, which shifted some interpretations of his temperament, words and actions. (Read a review in today’s Mke Journal/Sentinel.) All well and good, at least my thinking makes it so. But what about the art?

My wife and I went with friends to Bloomington/Normal where we were fortunate enough not only to stay with family but also to have a guided tour of art offerings in the twin cities. It was a great surprise and delight to find an exhibit of Claire Ashley’s work at the ISU University Galleries in Normal. Ashley came to my attention (in a big way) when I was artist in residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden last year. As a visiting artist, Ashley was a huge hit with her enormous and interactive inflatable sculpture that visitors were able to enter and move around the grounds. (See my blog post about it.)

The constraints of the gallery setting made her work less interactive but no less marvelous or enormous. In fact, her wildly colored, bloated forms were squeezed into what otherwise would have seemed like large spaces making them seem cramped, like Alice after taking a bite of cake and growing large.

The playfulness of the work is accentuated in their titles, which run from goofy (“Hunnybunny”) through descriptive (“Hangin’ Drape”) to suggestive (“Worms,” “Suckers,” or “Rump.”) The show title itself is equal parts bawdy and enigmatic: “Cawt, Taut, Hot … Not.”

This untitled, site specific installation made out of colored and distressed foamcore, along with a selection of her more characteristic pillow-shaped and spray-painted forms in plaster became part of the gallery wall.

A separate, smaller gallery contained (barely) two related forms with glowing paint eerily illuminated with black lighting. Ashley describes her work as “cartoony organisms referencing motherhood and eroticism.” Drawing on her training in psychology, my wife had another interpretation. She saw the blobby, organic forms as both invasive and banal like petty everyday anxieties that have grown out of control and can no longer be ignored.

Ashley shared the gallery spaces with another artist, Rob Swainston. The title of his show, “We thought they thought what we thought, but they didn’t,” was what reminded me of the Hamlet quote.

Although two-dimensional prints, Swainston’s work was no less monumental than Ashley’s. And if they were therefore less claustrophobic they made up for it with a barely decipherable density of dark, moody imagery with veiled references to something apocalyptic.

Measuring a full 16 feet tall, the largest reached from floor to ceiling, evoking Chinese scrolls. Most involved complex, multilayered and off-register woodblock printing. Some layered the woodblock-printed images over digital, inkjet-printed ones, an intriguing and surprisingly harmonious combination of ancient and contemporary technologies.

Less successful, I thought was an installation called “Shingles” that wrapped around the corner of one of the galleries. But clearly, it must have been my thinking that made it so. Hamlet also said, “Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”