On the ground floor of the Graphic Arts building lies a little-known secret that takes you back to the 19th century, to a time where printing was done by hand and considered an art. Cal Poly’s Shakespeare Press Museum looks just like a printing office from the 1800s and is run entirely by students.
“We like to think of it as we’re trying to keep what a 19th century working printing office would have been like,” said history graduate student Laura Sorvetti, assistant curator for the museum. “What we do is we offer students and the public at large a chance to see what it was like to print (in the 1800s).”
The Shakespeare Press Museum was started by a former newspaper man named Charles Palmer in 1964. He was known as “Shakespeare” to his friends and collected and restored printing equipment, which he was invited to display at Cal Poly. After his death, the collection was donated as a museum in 1966 and opened to the public in 1969.
As museum curator, graphic communications senior Alix Guyot is trying to increase its visibility to the campus and the public.
“I think this year we really want to focus on awareness, getting the word out that there is a museum,” she said. “We’re trying to get more involved with other departments that we think could benefit from the use of the museum.”
With over 12 printing presses and 450 fonts to choose from, the museum is thought to be one of the largest west of the Mississippi River, Sorvetti said, and one of only two working press museums this side of the Rockies.
Most of the working presses in the museum are used to print small postcards and cards. Currently, the club is printing Halloween and holiday cards to sell near the end of the quarter.
“We like to invite students down here to help us print, to design their own cards,” Sorvetti said. “It’s an art that I think is becoming more visible in the artistic community and just everywhere.”
In the museum, nearly everything is done by hand. There is no electricity, except for lights and no Internet connection. The letters of each font are individual so the printer has to set them out by hand, exactly how he or she want them.
“It’s a pretty intense process,” Sorvetti said. “You can’t just center something by pushing a button or have 50 fonts to look though and decide which one you want.”
“It’s pretty amazing to have something you produced from beginning to end,” she said.
The club handles a variety of projects, from the holiday cards to graduation announcements and even the occasional wedding invitations. Guyot said these projects come mostly from Graphic Communication majors who know about the museum.
“Once in a while the dean of the College of Liberal Arts comes down and has us (work on projects),” Guyot said. “She’s a big supporter of the museum.”
While Graphic Communications majors make up the majority of the people using the presses, Guyot and Sorvetti want to encourage all students and faculty to visit the museum and learn how to use the equipment.
“It’s hard to get people to know about it, to see a reason to come down here,” Sorvetti said. “We’d like to have what we know shared with the rest of the community.”
The club is working on digitizing the fonts they have so that others can use them on computers as well as with the presses. Some of these digitized fonts should be available in the next few months.
Sorvetti said they are also trying to work with Kennedy Library when it has a Book Arts exhibit in the spring. The club would like to get people who are familiar with letter presses to speak at the event and showcase their work as well as the work of the students in the Shakespeare Press Museum.
“People shouldn’t be intimidated to come down here if they don’t know anything,” Guyot said. “I just started doing letter press last year. There’s no skill level required or expected. We’re more than willing to teach and show and explain.”