about
The Shakespeare Press Museum is open to the public weekly for printing holiday greeting cards, wedding invitations, bookmarks, posters, and personal projects. The museum contains rare letterpress equipment, over 500 fonts of handset type, and a variety of printing papers. Everything in the museum dates from 1850 to 1950. The museum is maintained and run by volunteer student curators who are assisted by a faculty adviser.
history
Charles L. Palmer is the founder of the Shakespeare Press Museum. While attending San Francisco Polytechnic High School until 1918, Palmer acquired the nickname “Shakespeare” from his passion for writing poetry. In the 1930s, Palmer started acquiring presses while working as a publicist. Whenever he saw a derelict press, Palmer would arrange to buy, trade or otherwise acquire it, and thus build a collection of presses and type, and over the years he built an impressive collection, eventually naming his hobby press The Shakespeare Press.
Palmer decided that he wanted to find a site to house The Shakespeare Press when he no longer could maintain it. In 1944, the California Newspaper Publishers Association agreed to sponsor The Shakespeare Press. In exchange for sponsorship and the publicity it afforded the press, Palmer agreed to leave The Shakespeare Press to the CNPA after his death. In 1947, the association chose California State Polytechnic College (Cal Poly) as the possible site for the collection.
