Exhibition: Josef Gruber's collection of lead letters

Josef Gruber's collection of lead letters. A rare collection on the material culture of the printed book.

The LMU Munich University Library received a very special gift in the fall of 2019: retired Passau typesetter Josef Gruber (*1940) bequeathed his collection of lead type to the library. The collection includes a fully stocked type case for an Antiqua font and two complete type cases for a Grotesk font with uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.

The collection is rounded off with, among other things, typographic sketch files from the Bauer foundry in Frankfurt am Main, a thread counter, a square, and the collector's baptism certificate. This gives the university library a rare collection on the material culture of the printed book, as the lead letters of many printing houses were disposed of en masse at the end of the last century and are now irretrievably lost.