National Print Museum

This little museum, housed in an old chapel building of a military barracks, practically doubles as a working print workshop. You can find everything letterpress-print related: drawers of tiny metal type, a range of printing presses (from portable to monstrous), and even a loom-like machine that was used to draw lines for ruled ledger pages.

The museum also displays a very rare original copy of the Irish Proclamation of 1916, as well as the type of machine it would have been printed on—a steam-powered Wharfdale stop-cylinder press. There’s even a replica wooden Gutenberg press, which was used as a working prop in the television show The Tudors.

All of the machines and equipment are kept in working order, so the smells of the rubber ink and hot metal mingle with the sounds of a workshop to create a multi-sensory experience.

Rather than just looking at the collection, the museum encourages you to interact with it. The guide on duty can help you set your own name in metal type and hand-print it into a ‘Wanted’ poster for you to take home. Pull out the various drawers of type and marvel at tiny 8pt Times New Roman type, or beautifully decorative larger type. Perforate tiny holes into a sheet of paper and experience how a counterweight can vastly change what a machine feels like to operate.

The museum also hosts temporary exhibitions on all sorts of print and design related materials—beer labels, postage stamps, theatre posters, vinyl record cases, and more. Retired printers who were trained on these machines up until the 1980s volunteer here frequently, so if you’re lucky you may get to see a demo or hear a story of their time working in the print industry.