And, as the article points out, there is a lot of printing happening, both at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, and across the country, as a result of the astounding energy, effort and enthusiasm Jim and Bill Moran have put into building awareness about the contributions the Hamilton Wood Type Company, and now Museum, offer to America’s printing, business, design and cultural history. And, I would offer that they are contributing to the growth of letterpress printing as an art form, both in their own personal projects, and by welcoming and working with artists on a nearly weekly basis in the print shop at the Museum (it is a living museum).

There are a few slight mis-statements that I would like to offer corrections for:

-Neither Bill nor Jim Moran lives in Two Rivers, WI. Jim Moran, who was a third generation proprietor of the family printing business, lives in Green Bay, WI, and Bill, who is a well known type designer and graphic designer, runs his own design company, Blinc Publishing, in St. Paul, MN.

-The Hamilton Wood Type Company produced wood type. It was not a printing company, ever, so to use the phrase ‘providing wood type printing services’ is a bit misleading.

-The ‘re-strikes’ referred to toward the end of the article are actually from the Globe Collection, that is a part of the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum’s total collection. The Globe Collection was a large truckload worth of wood type and wood (and linoleum and metal) ‘cuts’ of imagery, words and phrases that the Globe Printing Company in Chicago donated to the Museum approximately 25 years after the Globe Printing Company had ceased operations in Chicago (and it no longer exists at all). The Museum is in the process of organizing, archiving, and bringing life back to the type and cuts, and the work that is being created with them is both a look back at the history of American design, advertising and printing, and a look forward as students, designers and artists use the blocks and type in new ways.

-The Lushootseed font has been cut and is already in the hands of students on the Tulalip Reservation; visit the Museum’s web site at http://www.woodtype.org to see photos of the kids with their first prints.

Clearly I am a fan of the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum and of all the hard work that Jim and Bill Moran have put into it over the past year and a half or so, and I have spent a lot of time volunteering in the Museum, and printing there as well. For letterpress printers and printmakers, it is a fairytale place that must be seen and experienced first hand to be truly believed.