Print Museum project in Mumbai announced at PS 23

In an open letter addressed to the members of the BMPA as well as delegates at Print Summit, Amit Shah, the president of the BMPA said, “The Mumbai Print Museum will showcase the rich printing tradition and the technological evolution of print with a special focus on print in the city and its environs.”

Housing printing equipment from the era of typography and lithography, metal foundry, hot-metal typesetting and photo typesetting, it will serve as a repository for a bygone age. It will also collect and display print products from rare books, posters, packaging, and other print ephemera.

Murali Ranganathan, print historian and author said, “As the years progress, the Mumbai Print Museum will seek to become a self-sustaining full-fledged print museum with a permanent site in a prominent Mumbai location. It will serve as a resource to understand how printing was done before the digital revolution. The focus of the museum is the ‘History of Printing in Mumbai and Western India’.”

On 16 February, the BMPA made an appeal to the industry A-Listers and VIPs to help. In an open letter which was distributed in the Print Summit kt, they said, “This is a long-term project which will require the support of all constituents of the printing and packaging industry. Print practitioners with a long multi-generational heritage in the printing industry will be the crucial source who will determine the success of this endeavour. Machines and print paraphernalia from earlier periods, whether in a working  condition or mothballed, are welcome. For example, this could be an early nineteenth-century Albion Press or the final models of Linotype and Monotype manufactured in the 1980s. Or it could be copper matrices of Indian typefaces from the early 1900s and film negatives used for phototypesetting in the 1970s. Or printing press manuals or product brochures. The list is endless.”

For further information, please contact: email: museum@bmpa.org