The National Print Museum, housed in the old Garrison Chapel at Beggar’s Bush Barracks, began life back in 1996. The Museum aims to ‘preserve the history of printing in Ireland’.

It houses a collection of working print technology operated by volunteers, many of whom are ex-print workers. The Museum’s mission is to ‘collect, document, preserve, exhibit, interpret and display the material evidence of printing craft and foster associated skills of the craft in Ireland’.

The Museum has a strong educational element to its activities and facilitates programmes for school and other children’s groups but also caters to a wider audience.

You can get a guided tour of the history of print at the museum, starting in the 1440s, when Johann Gutenberg revolutionised the process of making printed documents and books when he developed a printing process using individual pieces of raised metal type. These pieces could be assembled and used to print off a page.

It was Gutenberg’s moveable type that made the change so great. In the earlier woodblock process, each page had to be individually carved, whereas in Gutenberg’s process, the individual pieces could be assembled and disassembled, so once a page had been printed off, the type could then be re-used for the next page.

This was the main method of printing until the late 1800s. In 1884 a hot metal type-setting machine, the Linotype machine, was invented. The machine revolutionized printing and especially newspaper publishing, making it possible for a relatively small number of operators to set type for many pages on a daily basis.

The Linotype ‘Line of Type’ machine allowed printers to produce whole lines of text rather than setting text one character at a time.

Linotype came to Ireland in 1893 and was mostly used for the production of newspapers. This technology was further complimented by the Intertype which held more matrices so that different fonts and styles could be accommodated on the same page. In the 1930s Eamonn De Valera brought these machines in from America for the Irish Press newspaper. These machines are now housed in the Museum

The Linotype and the Intertype were more suited to producing newspapers, but in 1895 Tolbert Lanston developed the Monotype, which was ideal for the production of books. Instead of producing a metal slug of composed type the Monotype produced individual pieces of type so if the operator made a mistake he could simply go to a wooden case called an ‘economy case’ where pieces of type were stored, select what he needed and fix the mistake with the appropriate pieces of type. The economy case contained two partitions where type was stored, capital letters above and small letters below, hence upper and lower case.

The type was brought to a smooth surface called a stone on a ‘galley’ where the type was secured with page cord. It was then placed within a ‘chase’ which was a frame about the size of a newspaper page and the type was held in place inside the chase with bits of metal known as ‘gutters and furniture’. The completed piece, called a forme, was lifted off the stone and taken to the printing press.

The museum has a collection of antique printing presses such as the simple but clever Colombian press invented in 1812 and the Wharfedale Stop Cylinder press invented in 1858.

A Wharfedale Press was used to print the 1916 Proclamation at the old Liberty Hall. The printers in Liberty Hall were short of type which resulted in the Proclamation being printed in two parts and with awkward typesetting such as a C carved from an O.

There is a Shaw Pen Ruling machine which looks like a loom and could line paper for copy books and ledgers. The whole range of what was used in printing up until the advent of computerisation is there.

There are a number of workshops taking place over the summer and autumn months in calligraphy, Japanese woodblock printmaking, book making, paper making and origami.

The Museum is open Monday to Friday 9am–5pm and Saturday and Sunday 2pm–5pm except for bank holiday weekends. Telephone 01 6603770 or Email: info@nationalprintmuseum.ie or on the web at www.nationalprintmuseum.ie