I sadly just heard the news that The Type Archive in London will be moved from its location and its collections put into storage. The announcement by the Science and Museum Group (SMG), a set of quasi-public institutions that operates independently, doesn’t sugarcoat things. The Type Archive preserved the typefounding and wood-type history of the United Kingdom; they overlapped in part with the St Bride Library (or St Bride Printing Library), which has a smaller piece of typefounding history and more generally preserves UK printing history.

The Type Archive was led for decades by Sue Shaw, once an editor at Faber & Faber and other publishers, who became a fierce and relentless advocate for the preservation of Monotype’s manufacturing plant for its hot-metal type production equipment and its archives, as well as pulling in centuries of type foundry history acquired from Stephenson Blake and Company, and the last stages of the DeLittle wood type operations. She pulled all these assets into a historic building in Stockwell, chided funders and institutions to keep it there and running, and—unfortunately—resisted all efforts at figuring out a long-term plan for the archive’s survival. She passed away in 2020.

When I learned of The Type Archive and visited in 2017, when Sue gave me a lengthy tour that formed the backbone of my book London Kerning, it was clear from what she said and all the conversations I had with printers and others that funding was precarious. Several people said their worst fear is that without outside help, Sue would be unable to prevent the archive’s materials from being moved to distant warehouses, not easily available for research.

This would also shut down regular access, provided in recent years through exhibitions and tours, and the Monotype Hot-Metal Ltd., a company of four older men, former Monotype plant employees, who continued to produce new type matrices (molds) and other material for the remaining active Monotype type foundries around the world. These gentlemen, two of whom I had the pleasure to meet when I visited, have trained apprentices and passed on subsets of their roughly 150 years of collective knowledge.

You can view an extensive gallery of my 2017 trip to London to printers’ shops and through the St Bride Library and the Type Archive. The ebook edition of London Kerning is free to download; the print edition is sold out. This visit led nearly directly to my creation of The Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule.

SMG details the plans on the site. Ownership is complicated, but it boils down to the Monotype plant resources and Stephenson Blake type foundry materials moving to storage in Swindon, which Google Maps tells me is about an hour by rail from central London or two hours by car. It’s an apparently a load of old airplane hangars, converted to storage, with little access by researchers. What will happen to the DeLittle is not clear from this announcement, as the Type Archive effectively had the Monotype and Stephenson Blake material on loan, while the DeLittle wood material was owned directly by the archive.

It’s a sad end to an institution that preserved and provided some access to UK type-making history. However, Sue’s hard work in acquiring the collections and keeping them together seem to have paid off in providing a future for them remaining effectively in public hands.

Updated (March 2023): A post I had missed on the Metal Type Forum reproduced the following email from Monotype Hot-Metal LLC:

Dear Monotype Hot Metal customer

Please see the attached communications from the Science Museum and The
Type Archive.

The Type Archive is required to wind down its operations, including
Monotype Hot-Metal Ltd, in the very near future. The Science Museum owns
the Monotype collection and has loaned it to The Type Archive since the
1990s. The decision has been made to remove the collection. There have
been considerable efforts to find an alternative solution that would
allow The Type Archive collections to remain together and operational
but no viable solution has been found. There will be further cataloguing
work carried out by the Science Museum before the Monotype collection is
put into storage.

There is still no fixed timetable for the project ahead. Monotype Hot
Metal will aim to fulfil the orders that are currently underway.
Unfortunately it will not be possible to take on any new orders that
require manufacturing, but we will aim to fulfil orders from current
stocks of matrices where possible, with the cut off date being before
Monday 25 July 2022.

Please bear with us if we are slow to respond to any emails. We are a
small group of volunteers with a large and varied set of tasks to
perform.

Thank you very much for your support of The Type Archive over the years.
We have thoroughly enjoyed providing the matrix-making service.

Monotype Hot-Metal Ltd

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Please note that da@typemuseum.org is no longer a working email address;
all email to Monotype Hot Metal at The Type Archive should be addressed
to monotype@typearchive.org