Ham at 20 is a collaborative poster project celebrating the twentieth anniversary of The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.
We wanted to represent community and collaboration in our submission. Our poster includes a poem, written by one of our neighbors, about his encounter with one of our frequent shop visitors. We were so inspired by his words; they speak for our neighborhood that we are so proud to be a part of.
Buy a poster to support Hamilton Wood Type & Printing museum.
I was turning hotdogs on the grill tonight …
when a little kid I don’t think I’ve met before ran up and pulled on my leg.
‘Look what I made!’ he said.
He very very carefully pulled from a vellum envelope a print he’d just made.
I asked him to hold it so I could see it.
I whistled.
It was a glory of a thing and he knew it.
Without denting his pride or happiness he carefully placed it back inside the envelope.
There’s an Appalachian poet whose name escapes me who used to say …
If it’s not a pleasure, it’s not a poem.
I agree. There’s no point without the joy.
—Thom Fletcher
More about the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing museum:
The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum is the only museum dedicated to the preservation, study, production and printing of wood type. With 1.5 million pieces of wood type and more than 1,000 styles and sizes of patterns, Hamilton’s collection is one of the premier wood type collections in the world. In addition to wood type, the museum is home to an amazing array of advertising cuts from the 1930s through the 1970s, all of the equipment necessary to make wood type and print with it, as well as equipment used in the production of hot metal type, tools of the craft and rare type specimen catalogs.