Druckmuseum/Haus für Industriekultur

The Printing Museum sits in a four-story Art Nouveau building with decorative concrete panels and clinker brick exterior located on Kirschenallee 88 in Darmstadt. The museum holds an extensive collection of printing machines, typesetting equipment, and over one million matrix types spanning different periods of printing history.

The building was constructed in 1905 by architect Karl Klee for furniture maker Ludwig Alter and later served as an Opel parts warehouse from 1939 onward. Its transformation into a museum allowed traditional printing methods to be preserved when they were disappearing from everyday use.

The museum keeps printing crafts alive through working workshops where visitors watch typesetters arrange metal letters by hand and presses operate with human-powered movements. These active spaces show how printers worked generations ago.

The facility operates as a branch of the Hessian State Museum Darmstadt with working demonstration areas where visitors can watch printing techniques in action. Plan to spend time moving slowly through the workshops to grasp how each step of the printing process was done by hand.

The third floor houses one of Germany's last working type foundries where visitors can watch individual lead letters being cast from molten metal. The complete process from liquid metal to finished letter shows craft techniques that have vanished from modern manufacturing.