ERNEST A. LINDNER
Founder and Collector, 1911 to 2001

As a young man, working for his uncle and father, who rebuilt and sold used typesetting equipment, Ernest A. Lindner began collecting.

"We would sell a man a machine and take in trade a piece he was replacing, because it was worn out, outdated or otherwise unsuitable. I couldn't bear to throw some of these wonderful machines away, so I began to shove them into corners, even after there were no more corners."

Eventually, he began to comb the world searching for old hand-lever presses and typesetting machines that were the wonders of the machine age. He found a rare Rogers Typograph in the back of a Berlin factory; an 1828 Imperial printing press in a tobacconists shop in Longsutton, England, where it had been operated by succeeding generations of fathers and sons. He prowled ghost towns, auctions, at junk stores and out-of-the-way antique shops to assemble one of the largest and finest collections of antique printing machinery in the world. Ernie and his wife, Harriet, have personally restored many of the pieces in their collection, now on display at the International Printing Museum.