International Ex Libris Competition
About Tipoteca Italiana
Invitation to the Competition - About Tipoteca Italiana - Rules of the International ex libris competition
(from the press release)
Tif, Tipoteca Italiana foundation and the “Museo del Carattere e della Tipografia” (Type and Printing Museum) are situated in Cornuda, in the Treviso province in the northeastern region of Italy.
The Foundation, launched and funded by the Antiga brothers who own and run a modern printing company, was created with the aim of safeguarding historic printing machinery and promoting the value of printing and of mobile printing types.
The Museum occupies 2,125 square meters. The buildings, which shelter over 150 printing machines and hundreds of sets of printing types, the public area and the library cover 1,120 square meters. The Museum is housed within a site that is of great relevance to industrial archaeology, the former “Canapificio Veneto” hemp mill, within the recently renovated buildings of the former church and guesthouse.
Tipoteca Italiana is a private foundation established in 1995. After the necessary period of fund raising the Tipoteca opened the Type and Printing Museum to the public in November 2002. The Foundation maintains links with similar institutions in Italy and in the rest of Europe and carries out cultural activities with publications, exhibitions and educational tours for school groups and for people generally interested in the history of printing and the visual-graphic arts.
The Museum employs research staff, personnel involved in the purchase of exhibits and technicians in charge of repairing and maintaining the machinery and equipment in its original working order. The Tipoteca has attracted the interest of cultural organizations, specialised magazines and important members of the local and national press.
In the history of mankind the invention of printing and movable types led to an immense change in the dissemination of culture and knowledge. Books which had been available in small numbers in manuscript form could now be printed and distributed by the hundreds and thousands of copies. The invention of the movable types is therefore a symbol of the revolution that has accompanied man from the Renaissance to the present day. The handpress improved gradually finally becoming the fast, complex printing machines of today.
Typesetting too has improved with the new technology going from Monotype to Linotype, which has greatly helped to increase the production of printed material. In the 1980s new technology led to the spread of electronic typesetting at a rate that was unprecedented in production technology. The lead and wood movable types came to the end of a brilliant career that had lasted over five hundred years, and left a clear field to the digital age. Silvio Antiga, president of the Foundation, has been a passionate witness of this evolution in printing and in the crafts and skills that are part of it. The transition has been cause of growing concern and he felt that without prompt action those machines and printing types which had dominated culture and progress for so long would disappear forever under the sledge hammer or at best, recycled in a smelting cauldron.
Mr Antiga began to collect the printing types and the equipment that were gradually being substituted in his printshop and later began to purchase whatever other printers were discarding. This action soon found supporters in his own brothers, who share the responsibility of managing the Grafiche Antiga printing firm and who were determined to give a solid buttress to his efforts.
Today the museum is an active entity whose importance has been widely recognised and which is visited not only by students but also by an ever-growing number of experts and tourists. All the machines are functioning and workshops and demonstrations are carried out in the Museum while collection and restoration of other items continue undeterred.
To learn more: Tipoteca Italiana
