Appleton Coated will be featuring letterpress printing demonstrations and limited-edition keepsakes from Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum during the HOW Design Conference, held June 22-25 in Boston. As sponsors, Utopia coated papers and Curious Collection papers also will display their latest tools and promotions in the Resource Center, a live exhibit hall.

"Every day at the Resource Center, we'll have a different give-away exclusively designed and printed Hamilton Wood Type for conference attendees," says Ferkó X. Goldinger, advertising and promotion manager at Appleton Coated. These limited-edition items will highlight typefaces from Hamilton's vast collection as printed on Utopia coated papers and Curious Collection papers in a variety of colors and finishes. In addition, Hamilton Wood Type will create the 12-foot-long posters that serve as the backdrop for Appleton Coated's booth at HOW.

Goldinger elaborates, "With 1.5 million pieces of wood type and more than 1,000 styles and sizes of patterns, Hamilton's collection is one of the premier wood type collections in the world. Appleton Coated's Utopia brand offers the most comprehensive line-up of premium, coated papers. It's a perfect mash-up to share with the 3,000 designers and creative professionals at HOW."

Located in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum is the only museum dedicated to the preservation, study, production and printing of wood type. Appleton Coated sponsors the museum's type specimen sheet archiving program and documentation of its type collection. In addition to wood type, the museum is home to an array of advertising cuts from the 1930s through the 1970s, and all of the equipment necessary to make wood type and print with it, as well as equipment used in the production of hot metal type, tools of the craft and rare type specimen catalogs.

Hamilton Wood Type's representatives will bring brayers ink and type to Appleton Coated's display booth at the HOW Design Conference. The over-sized posters will be hand embellished by the museum's director, Jim Moran, and artistic director, Bill Moran. As brothers, they grew up amongst ink, type and paper. Both are respected creative professionals and historians. They will be printing some of Appleton Coated's printed collectibles using a Chandler & Price Platen Press that has been in their family for three generations.

"Appleton Coated has a clear vision for giving designers and printers something that no one else can give them," says Jim Moran. "Letterpress is cool again. We're very glad to see this renewed interest, but for the last few years, we're normally seeing it on an uncoated sheet with a lot of tooth and texture. Letterpress printing on coated paper hasn't been done very much."

Bill Moran interjects, "It's exciting to experiment and show the possibilities of these combinations. With Curious papers, there's a softer finish that's familiar, but the rich colors and metallics can deliver fun surprises. With Utopia's smooth, hard finish, we get this high-fidelity look where, sometimes, you can even see the wood grain of the type."

Jim Moran adds, "Appleton Coated and its people have been unbelievably generous supporters of the museum's mission. They are a big part of helping us tell Hamilton's story in our shared home state of Wisconsin and across North America, and at events such as HOW."