Educational Media Reviews Online

This warm-hearted, at time elegiac, yet unflaggingly hopeful documentary profiles the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum, the world’s largest wood type printing collection, located in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, an emblematically sleepy little Midwestern town enervated by globalization and separated by several hours’ drive from any sizeable metropolises. Operated by a dwindling handful of devoted, aging volunteers, some of whom are the last remaining practitioners of the craft, the one-of-a-kind museum, dedicated to preserving and promoting the heritage and contemporary relevance of an exquisitely analogue art form to an increasingly digital world features over one and a half million wood type pieces, and over a thousand different styles and pattern sizes. Within twenty years after it began production in 1880, Hamilton had dominated the market to become the largest provider of type in the United States, setting the stage for its influential historical role in the development of American graphic design. The museum currently hosts educational events and workshops by some of the last remaining practitioners of the craft, to which artists, college students and instructors of graphic arts from around the country travel. A host of such enthusiasts, mainly from Chicago area collegiate graphic art programs, appear in the film.

In addition to its obvious immediate appeal to interests surrounding the history and future of graphic arts, the film’s timely sensitivity to the contrasts between contemporary urban and rural life, no less than its exploration of the perennial creative tension between innovation and tradition, will resonate broadly for a wide audience. The DVD includes extra scenes.