The Museum's archive of documents includes tens of thousands of invoices, costing sheets, quotations, client orders, letters, journals, proofs, galleys, job bags, material supply orders, press sheets, finished works and many other items relating to operation of a printing business or the clients of a printer.

Negatives and finished artwork (mechanicals) are nominally included in artefacts but may be found here as part of the contents of a job bag.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION An official order and the four job bags it covers.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION A job bag contents: official order, covering letter from client and a copy of the finished label.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION Read about numbering, perforating, carbonless copy process. Triplicate, three-up invoice book, quarter-bound in croc board.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION Record covers (12-inch vinyls, remember them?) as they left the printer.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION Business letter from a printing machinery merchant, 1964.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION Journal of a printing maintenance company, listing printeries visited.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION Job bag with contents: hand-written costing calculations, negative, copies of finished item.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION Job bags strewn around a closed printery: the Museum is negotiating to save them.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION Research Access, note for applicants Large job bag (or negative envelope) containing artwork, negatives and finished booklet.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION Job bag and contents: client instructions written on former printed cards with proof-sheet of Linotype typesetting.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION Finished item, two-sided sales information leaflet from the 1970 era.

ENLARGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION Press sheet, probably produced by copperplate stamping. The sheet has four letterhead pages on it. It has largely deteriorated, having been used as a wrapper for the copper plates.

Some of these examples are safely in the Museum's venue. They are fascinating and tell wonderful stories, but the venue can hold less than 5% of the Museum's world-unique collection. It is a matter of some grief that the rest, including the world's only large collection of typesetting machinery and the only collection of its kind of printing documents and artefacts, are not being protected by the authorities or industry and are in danger of being scrapped.

THE 95% THAT'S IN STORAGE AND IN JEOPARDY . . .
ENLARGEMENT? SEE JUNE PICTORIAL (DOWNLOADS)	<< View over some 20% of the Museum's collection of documents and artefacts, boxed and palletted in the store, including many like those above. The artefact collection, if it survives the present crisis, will allow researchers a detailed view of what was being printed mid to late 20th century, and how it was printed.
	ENLARGEMENT? SEE JUNE PICTORIAL (DOWNLOADS) Some of our thousands of stereotype matrices, from which stereotype plates were cast. Stereos (and electrotypes) were a way of making multiple copies of the same printing type or block.