Haverhill, Massachusetts, USA - Tours of the Museum of Printing, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, begin, naturally, with Johannes Gutenberg. A replica of the German inventor’s fifteenth-century Bible is open for perusal among displays of more than a hundred other Good Books—almost all collected by museum president Frank Romano. There’s one in Braille, others in “Pirate Speak” and phonetic shorthand, along with a framed leaf of the Eliot Indian Bible, the first translated into an American indigenous language, printed at Harvard in the mid 1600s. He's still hankering to fill holes in his collection, and ultimately wants a copy of every Bible printed in English.

Not that he needs more stuff. Romano’s almost 50-year-old museum is run by volunteers and housed in a nondescript 30,000-square-foot building packed, conservatively, with close to two million items. That includes another 11,000 books, vintage letterpresses, stone lithography and offset and phototypesetting equipment, typewriters, and an original Xerox machine. “Every different printing method is here,” Romano says—including one of only 50 working linotype machines in the country. That revolutionary invention, introduced in the 1880s, mechanically lays out a line of metal type, doing the work of a host of hand-typesetters. This panoply reflects the museum’s mission: to preserve and show the technical development of modern graphic arts in America, with a focus on printing and typesetting from Gutenberg through Steve Jobs. “We want people to realize the importance of history,” says Romano, “because the technology of printed matter changes everything.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE in Harvard Magazine.