Exhibition 'The Old Printing House'

About exhibition

Among the rare surviving examples of small private printing houses from 1900–1910 is the building now part of the Museum of Printing, located at 2 Volynskiy Lane. The printing house was built in 1905 and, despite its small size, represented a well-organized production and printing complex. The exhibition, whose sections reflect the work of the printing house's departments (workshops), allows visitors to become acquainted with its activities. The exhibition presents examples of printing equipment and professional typographic tools from the 19th and early 20th centuries — composing benches, tenacle and visoring tools, a hand printing press, printing presses, a work table and a cupboard with trays, scoring and cutting machines, a wire-stitching machine, a cart for transporting hand-set type, and others. A model of the printing house helps to visually represent how the staff's work was distributed across the building's three floors; this model can be called an outstanding work of model-making art. Special attention in the display is paid to the work of the proofreader, on whom the absence of errors and typos in the issued publications depended. An important feature of the exhibition is the inclusion of interactive zones that allow visitors to learn more about the printer's profession, study materials on the history of printing, and read articles from newspapers that were printed in the early 20th century at the publishing and printing complex at 2 Volynskiy Lane.