In Haverhill, Massachusetts, less than five miles from my house, you can find the Museum of Printing. It’s crammed with typesetters, typewriters, computers, printing presses, and lots of other things. It’s open on Saturdays.

Recently I started as a volunteer. I’ve found a niche in the library, which has about 6,000 books on all aspects of printing. Its cataloguing system is a spreadsheet; eventually we may improve on it. The library doesn’t circulate, so it isn’t urgent.

When I say “library” I’m talking about the Frank Romano Library. The museum has five libraries, and so far I’ve gotten a good look at only two of them. The other three are font libraries, so they aren’t the kind where you’d sit down and enjoy a nice read.

There’s a “hologram” of Benjamin Franklin; I don’t know how long it’s going to be there. I put the word in quotes because it isn’t actually a 3-D image. It consists of images projected onto three whirling fans that aren’t coplanar. The fans are nearly invisible when running, and the resulting image looks somewhat three-dimensional when viewed from the front. Even if it isn’t a hologram, it’s unusual and eye-catching.

A personal favorite of mine is the Quadritek 1200, a phototypesetting console from the 1980s that used cassettes for data storage. I worked for Itek and wrote software for it, including parts of the data communication module.

If you’d like to see more, here’s my Flickr album from the museum.