Museum of Printing and Graphic Arts

This museum of the graphic arts and printing is located in the sixteenth-century monastery of Santa Maria at Puig near Valencia. Copying manuscripts in the scriptorium was the main way to reproduce text until the invention of printing. The museum argues that the printing press led to an intellectual transformation by making texts accessible beyond readers in monasteries and great houses. It created new opportunities for both reader and writer. The museum offers a tour through the history of printing, from its origins to the present day. It begins with a reconstruction of a fifteenth-century printing shop with a wooden press like that of Gutenberg and examples of books printed in Valencia in the fifteenth century. The exhibition then follows the explosion of new inventions in printing after the early nineteenth century, from the first iron presses to linotype machines and computer typesetting. There are also displays showing silkscreen printing and lithography and the complete processes of bookbinding.