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The Balinson Jewish Type Collection
The Bibliography & Print Room at Massey College is home to a hidden gem of Canadian Jewish print culture: The Balinson Jewish Type Collection. Comprising 11 different fonts of metal type and 3 fonts of wood type, this represents the most comprehensive collection of Hebrew type in Canada. But this type was not primarily used to print in Hebrew—it was formerly used by Henry Balinson (1888-1961) to print the first and only Yiddish newspaper published in Hamilton, Ontario. From traces of Balinson’s print shop to recent printing projects created using his type, this exhibition celebrates Balinson’s type as a remarkable and rare example of local Yiddish tangible heritage and demonstrates that the best way to preserve his type and honour its legacy is through use.
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<aside> <img src="/icons/book_gray.svg" alt="/icons/book_gray.svg" width="40px" /> The Bibliography & Print Room
The Balinson Jewish Type Collection has found its new home at the Bibliography & Print Room, a hands-on letterpress printing space and community tucked inside Massey College’s Robertson Davies Library at the University of Toronto. In addition to a niche special collection largely devoted to the history of the book and printing techniques, the Library houses a teaching collection of five active nineteenth-century iron hand presses and three clamshell presses, as well as a wide range of metal and wood types, ornaments, illustrative blocks, and more antique letterpress printing equipment.
A makerspace for the nineteenth century
The Bibliography Room operates as a learning laboratory and living museum space that hosts classes and tours and is open to volunteer printing apprentices. Visiting the Bibliography Room is a multi-sensory experience not so unlike entering a mechanic’s workshop, with sounds of machinery and equipment and the smells of wood, solvents or inks that fill the space. Here, visitors have the opportunity to actually get their hands dirty and explore the craft of printmaking. In setting type and operating printing presses themselves, visitors experience first-hand the shapes, textures, and surprising heft of the artifacts of this trade.
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This view of the Bibliography Room features one of Balinson’s homemade type cases, in which some of his metal type originally arrived to Massey College. The type case is laid out on the marble work bench.
