About us

The Printing Museum was established in 1996 to preserve and to protect the material and cultural values of the Cieszyn printing guilds. Its aim is also to commemorate the rich traditions of typography in the area of Cieszyn.

It is a magical place where you can feel the climate and atmosphere of the past and find a real typographical printing-shop with a rich diversity of types, matrices, chemo-graphical plates, woodblocks, casting devices, printing machines and presses, clamps and bookbinding tools. Other printing techniques are also ehibited here.

All the machinery is in perfect working condition. Our museum is one of the best- equipped places of its kind in the entire country. We collect all possible documents on the history of printing and on persons of merit in this field.

History of the printint museum in Cieszyn

On the1st of April 1992 a firm called “Prodruk” came into being and its chairman Karol Franek, an experienced printer in the Cieszyn Printing and Publishing House (Cieszyńska Drukarnia Wydawnicza) decided to change its legal status.Since that time the Printing-House has been designated as as an institution of historical value. In 1992 he equipped the plant with ca. 25 typesetter tool cases (16 with types), 2 linotypes, sheet cutter, 2 pressure printers (B4 page size), 3 flat linotypes for page size B3, B2, and B1. In the following years he gathered many more of outdated and antique printing machines. Due to the rapid progress in printing technology in the 90s of the 20th century it turned out, that running a typography printing house had become unprofitable. In 1995 the whole plant was moved to a building in Głęboka Street 50 and finally the preparations and arrangements to create a Printing Museum were started. The mayor of the city Jan Olbrycht supported the idea of a museum. In 1996 the firm “Prodruk” gratuitously handed over all the antique equipment to Cieszyn's municipal authorities, who, it turned out, were not prepared to establish the museum – so once again the firm “Prodruk” was forced to retain the costly undertaking of housing the museum artifacts. But the firm experienced financial difficulties as the museum was an unprofitable institution. In 1995 the entire firm was moved to the building in Głęboka Street 50 and here the preparations and arrangements to create a Printing Museum were started.

In 2003 a group of printers from Cieszyn held several meetings to discuss the future of the museum and they decided to form an association to take it over. The group's representatives obtained the needed funds from the mayor's office under the condition, that the new association would be officially registered.

The first meeting of the founding body (29 members) was held on the 17th of October 2003 there were 5 persons on Board of Trustees who passed the by-laws and on the 2nd of July 2004 the association named The Printing Museum in Cieszyn (Muzeum Drukarstwa w Cieszynie) was officially registered in the District Court in Bielsko Biała.

In Autumn 2010 The Printing Museum as the city's only representative, was included among the prestigious sites forming the “Industrial Monuments Route” (Szlak Zabytków Techniki) in the region of Upper Silesia.